Sunday, September 23, 2012

Stories below the fold

Another day, another typhoon. It's in the Visayas, but supposed to go straight north and avoid our area.

we are still in the midst of harvesting rice, and it has rained nearly every afternoon  but not continously, so we can harvest and now that we have our own drier, get the rice dried before it deteriorates from mould.

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Illegal logging? We haz that. Yes, there are laws, but they aren't enforced.

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Private charity giving has long been part of the American landscape, and those who are hyperventillating over Romney as a tax cheat  because he gives a lot to charity need to check their history LINK 

One trivia question about rich folks who don't pay taxes ignore how one rich heiress (and step cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis) actually had congress pass a bill to lower her tax payments. Full story here.

Katharine’s charities outstripped her considerable fortune, especially after the introduction of the federal income tax, which at one point was gobbling up a third of her income. In a move that would be hard to imagine with today’s Alternative Minimum Tax, Congress in 1924 passed a bill providing that any person who had given at least 90 percent of their income to charity for the preceding 10 years would be exempt from federal taxes. The bill was widely understood to include no one but Katharine Drexel.

In contrast, the Obama administration will force charities to pay a huge tax penalty because they won't fund contraception/abortion pills, denying that these organizations have anything to do with religion.Maybe he needs to read the IRS pamphlet that I linked to above.

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Speaking of Charity: The charity sweepstakes and now the push for Casinos to bring in money is not getting approval of the old leftie (now retired) Archbishop Cruz. He has a couple of articles on his blog against...gambling. Catholics are not against gambling per se, but sees the pushing of casinos and games of chance in the name of "charity" is merely a way for politicians to get rich while corrupting the poor.

The casinos now being pushed have other "added attractions" for corruption, such as prostitution, including the exploitation of young boys and girls, and of course selling "shabu" and other illicit drugs.

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Related item: A priest remembers Martial Law in the Philippines under Marcos.

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The NYTimes suggests that if you eat a diet that gives you kwashiorkor, you will not die of heart disease. Why do I say that? because our patients in Africa villages ate that diet, and we didn't see heart disease (which only was seen in those eating a European diet).
However, they died of infection, their wounds didn't heal, and we saw a lot of B vitamin deficiencies,  toxemia or pregnancy, and of course, the high fiber diet led to deaths from Sigmoid vovulus...



--cartoon from Paleohacks
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Here is how to lower your stress level:


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Peter Jackson reports the first hobbit movie will be "only" 2 hours and 3 minutes long, says TORN, and he posts this new poster of a fairly vicious looking Bilbo.


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