Stanley "Tookie" Williams was executed at midnight on December 13th.

We at NIPPIES are not believers in capital punishment.We believe in life in prison. However, after seeing the photos of Stanley Williams' victims, and reading more about his story, we can understand better why the appeals for clemency for Tookie Williams were denied by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

OK, so you want to see the photos? Well, we at NIPPIES recommend that that you do NOT view these photos. The visuals are graphic and gory beyond description, as are several other photos and film clips (of beheadings) found on Michael Savage .com

We repeat, do NOT visit Michael Savage's web site if you are faint of heart! The visuals are horrific. We think Michael has them there so we cannot forget the evil that time, and the liberal media, mitigates.

We listen to Michael Savage's talk show whenever possible. We do not agree with everything the man stands for, but we do agree with much of it. He's got a lot of courage to say the things he says because what he says is far from politically correct. But there is a lot of truth to what Michael says.

Back to Tookie Williams of the Crips gang. He has been on death row at San Quentin State Prison since 1981: his death sentence came about because he was convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection for the slaying of store clerk Albert Owens during the robbery of a 7-Eleven store (witnesses claim Owens begged for his life), and the shooting deaths of three members of the Yang family � Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Chen Yang and Yu-Chin Yang Lin.

Yes, Williams has tried to change his life since being convicted. He's written 9 books and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times and the Nobel Prize for literature one time. However, he is, at the end of the day, a convicted murderer of four.

The letal injection was given with some difficulty because of Stanley Williams' muscles. He denied his guilt to the end.

Docs using less chemo in treating breast tumors

This news will come as a relief to the many who dread the effects of chemotherapy: (from a story in the New York Post by Marilynn Marchione) "Guidelines recently adopted in Europe and similar ones unveiled this weeekend at a conference in Texas will result in far fewer women getting chemotherapy in the future."

The NYPost story explains that the newest treatments will be more specifically tailored on each woman's specific type of breast tumor. Past decisions on treatment were based on tumor size as well as lymph node involvement alone. Now, under the new guidelines, the most important factor is whether the tumor's growth "depends on estrogen or progesterone." Alternative treatment now includes a hormone blocker rather than chemo for women with hormone-driven tumors.

Many women, and indeed most cancer patients, dread chemotherapy. The reasons are valid: chemo destroys all rapidly dividing healthy cells as well as malignant ones, resulting in mouth sores, nausea and other very unpleasant side effects. And, according to the NYPOST article, only about 15 percent of women getting the chemo were helped by chemotherapy. About 25% got worse, despite the chemo, and a "whopping" 60 percent would have been fine with hormones along. "For the vast majority of patients, we probably overtreat," said Dr. William Gradishar of Northwestern University of Chicago.

"It's not that chemotherapy is not of value, it's that the value is smaller in women with hormone-driven disease," siad Dr. Robert Carlson, who spearheaded the group of U.S. doctors who composed the new guidelines. "We're trying to determine if the benefit is so small that we should not be recommending chemotherapy."

This relatively new view of breast cancer and chemo will no doubt help thousands of women to live longer and better quality lives.

High Cost in the U.S. does NOT necessarily mean BETTER care...

If you would believe many, the high salaries and high cost of medicines in the healthcare "industry" in the U.S. make for better care. Well, a recent survey disputes this claim.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Patients in the United States reported higher rates of medical errors and more disorganized doctor visits and out-of-pocket costs than people in Canada, Britain and three other developed countries, according to a survey released on Thursday.

Thirty-four percent of U.S. patients received wrong medication, improper treatment or incorrect or delayed test results during the last two years, the Commonwealth Fund found....READ MORE...

U.S. Leads Way in Medical Errors - Reuters, written by Susan Hervey

Unfortunately, the very high cost of paying for medical care has caused up to half of Americans to fail to see a doctor when needed, or to take necessary medication.

As the ONLY country in the industrialized world which has made medicine a profit-seeking industry, it is high time we stop pretending that the healthcare bubble is not near bursting.

Labor Dept.: Special Treatment for Wal Mart?!! You have got to be kidding, right? The United States Labor Department has granted a concession to the retailing monster, Wal Mart. The UNITED STATES Department of Labor will give Wal Mart 15 days notice before descending on them to see what they are up to. Ohmygosh.

Teamsters Article on Wal Mart's Special Treatment

You probably haven't read Anne Frank's whole diary...
If, like so many of us, you read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl prior to 1989, when the scholarly work entitled The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition was published, then you haven't really read the whole diary.

When Otto Frank originally had the diary of his tragic younger daughter published, he chose to omit many of Anne's entries for the sake of brevity (necessary to get the work published) and discretion. References to Anne's budding sexuality were taken out. So were the candid but subjective (after all, Anne was a young teen) descriptions of the people, relationships and events that occured in the "Secret Annex", the name that Anne chose for their hiding place situated above her father's offices at 263 Prinsengracht Street in Amsterdam.

A good explanation of why the original edition of Anne's diary was somewhat sanitized appears in the FOREWARD of The Definitive Edition: The Diary of a Yount Girl, which we at NIPPIES have just finished reading. The Definitive Edition came out after the Critical Edition, and is a compilation of the original book edited by Otto H. Frank with previously unpublished passages which were edited by Mirjam Pressler/ translation by Stacy Knecht and Nancy Forest-Flier. The Definitive Edition was originally published by Doubleday in March 1995, Anchor Books trade edition March 1996 and Bantom Edition (paperback) March 1997.) The FOREWARD states that when the original edition of Anne's diary, edited by her father (Otto H. Frank) was first published in 1947,
"it was not customary to write openly about sex, and certainly not in books for young adults. Out of respect for the dead (of the eight who hid in the Secret Annex, only Mr. Frank survived), Otto Frank also omitted a number of unflattering passages about his wife and the other residents of the Secret Annex."

Anne Frank kept her diary from June 12, 1942 (her thirteenth birthday) until August 1, 1944 - three days before the German police raided the Secret Annex and sent it's residents off to death camps. One day in 1944, Anne heard Gerrit Bolkestein, as member of the Dutch government in exile, announce on the radio from London that after the was he hoped to make a compilation of eyewitness accounts of the Dutch people who suffered under German occupation.

Anne, wanting so much to be a writer, decided to rewrite much of her diary so that it would be suitable for publication after the war. In The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, published in 1989, you can read all three versions of Anne's diary: the original, unedited version; the edited version which was published by her father in 1947, and the rewritten diary which Anne Frank worked on in 1944. Having read the sanitized diary which was published in 1947, and then having read the "Definitive Edition", we at NIPPIES can tell you that you honestly have missed a LOT if you haven't read all of the words written by Anne during her time in hiding.

What is most amazing about Anne Frank's words is that she was so young when she wrote them. The diary, a thirteenth birthday present, began shortly after she received the pink and green plaid cloth-bound book in mid-June, 1942. (The first entry was one month before they Franks, along with their friends, went into hiding on July 9, 1942). Anne Frank is little more than fifteen years of age in her final entries. But her writing, even at thirteen, reflects a well-educated, increasingly insightful young woman who wants nothing more than to just be an ordinary teenager. Even more amazing is her ability to keep the interest of the reader at such a young age. The book would be spellbinding even if it had been a work of fiction, which is it most definitely not: After Otto Frank's death in 1980, the manuscripts were willed to the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam. A thorough investigation was conducted into the authenticity of the diary and it was proved, "beyond the shadow of a doubt, to be genuine" (The Definitive Edition) before it was published in its entirety in The Critical Edition in 1989.

About the movie...
If you have only seen The Diary of Anne Frank movie of 1959, you really owe it to yourself, and history, to read one of the later editions of Anne Frank's diary. The movie, starring Millie Perkins as Anne Frank, is one of NIPPIES all time favorites. It is gripping and entertaining, and we at NIPPIES enjoy it so much that we've seen it several times and would buy it on DVD - if we could find it! It is appears to be a very fair representation of how life was in the Secret Annex. But you will find after reading either The Critical Edition or The Definitive Edition that the screenplay took a few liberties with the truth of not only how the eight residents lived, but with certain events and even with the personalities and relationships that existed in the cramped living quarters. For instance, in the movie, the residents never ventured beyond the bookcase door. However, in reality, the eight residents of the Annex did frequently venture beyond the bookcase-door of their hiding place. On the weekends, the took bathes in the offices below. They also went down to the private office to listen to the radio or for privacy. (According to the movie, it was forbidden by Mr. Frank for anyone to go beyond the bookcase.)

The relationships between the Annex residents are, from what we gathered, altered and/or watered down a bit for the movie compared to the way Anne Frank portrayed them in her diary. For example, Anne had tired of Peter, at least in a romantic way, in the weeks before their arrest. Anne readily admits in her diary that she set out to establish a relationship with Peter to gratify her own needs. Their romance and nightly visits went on throughout April and May 1944, but had ended well before the Annex was raided on the morning of August 4, 1944. (The Definitive Edition states that an SS officer and at least three local police, armed but out of uniform, pulled up in front of the Secret Annex between ten and ten thirty in the morning.) However, in the 1959 movie, Anne and Peter are shown looking out the attic window on that last day together and, upon hearing the sirens approach the annex, kissing each other with passion. What else could you expect from Hollywood circa 1959?

Also referred to in the diary but not shown in the movie: a slight flirtation between Mr. Dussel and Mrs. Van Daan (not their real names); Anne's often cold - even hostile, at times - and distant feelings toward her mother as well as her (Anne's) belief that Mr. Frank did not really love his wife in a romantic way; and the fact that the Annex residents regularly had some of the office staff as lunch guests. There appeared to be a bit of a flirtation, albeit harmless, going on between Mr. Dussel and Mrs. van Daan that is never portrayed in the movie. Mr. and Mrs. van Daan did argue frequently, according to Anne, but were really very fond of each other. There is no reference to Mr. van Daan stealing food during the night, as there is in the movie. There are other discrepancies in the way the movie plays out which differ from what Anne wrote about life in the Secret Annex: many more people were involved in helping the eight Jews hide above the spice factory in Amsterdam than just Mr. Krauller and Miep, as the movie suggests. There were two of Mr. Franks former partners (Mr. Kugler and Mr. Kleinman) who were involved, two secretaries (Miep and Bep), and also Miep's husband, Jan. Bep's mother and father, who worked in the warehouse until he became ill, also know and visited the residents of the Annex on at least one occasion.

Mr. Kugler and Mr. Kleinman were arrested and sent to prison after the Annex was discovered. Meip and Bep were not. However, Mr. Kleinman was released within weeks because of his chronically bleeding ulcer, and Mr. Kugler escaped from his prison within months of capture.

No matter what, who can deny that the true story Anne Frank and her family and friends is one of the most unforgettable of all time? You don't have to be Jewish to be overwhelmed by the injustice of what happened to these people. The story is not just about Hitler and his hatred of Jews and the apathy of so many who allowed the whole nightmare of WWII to happen. It is about what can happen when one sees evil and chooses to ignore it because it doesn't affect them. It is a story that is timeless, and one that will happen again if we are not ever vigilant toward injustice and hatred.

Which brings we at NIPPIES to our final point. Why has this story been allowed to recede to the back of bookshelves and disappear from movie stores? I say this because, after my little one saw the movie, she went to school - she's in fifth grade - and talked about it. Many of the children had not heard the story of Anne Frank. When we went to rent the movie at our local Blockbuster, they didn't have it. We had to go to a Blockbuster several towns away to find it. And then, it was not on DVD but only on an old VHS. A few years ago, when we rented it from another movie store (Movie Gallery), the clerk said, "Oh, I'm so glad someone is finally taking this movie out. It never gets rented."

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.--George Santayana