Stories you might have missed

It is now not PC to name diseases after people, places or things, says the WHO who is too busy being PC to admit they botched the many epidemics in Africa, including ebola (the reason I say many epidemics is because malaria kills more than Ebola, and it kills partly because of the DDT ban but also because when people take medications for malaria, often the medicines are counterfeit and substandard or completely fake).

but of course, this is not a new problem:

Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.

supposedly, some of Columbus' sailors gave it to the lovely ladies of Naples, who spread it to the French, but no one wants to admit that those good catholic sailors caroused with the lovely ladies of the West Indies who were, after all, pagans and taboo...presumably they baptized the lovely ladies first, as Magellan's sailors did here in the Philippines.

Diseases are named all sorts of ways: After the discoverer, after the place of origin, after the symptoms. And often they have several names, including the "official" name.

So German Measles is also Rubella, i.e. red rash, and syphilis got it's name from a poem about a shepherd who suffered from the disease. In other words, the WHO can rant all it wants to, but ordinary folks will use the words they remember easier.

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The "EMP", the electronic pulse from a nuclear weapon that wipes out electronic circuits, has been a worry since the 1970's...but why is the US Military moving their headquarters back into Cheyenne Mountain?

Because you don't need a nuke to wipe out everyone's computer/pacemaker/car.

but now there are ways to do this using microwaves.

 Since the 1990s devices using high-powered microwave (HPM) devices have been developed to create focused EMP on demand without all the nuclear blast and radioactivity.  The most commonly mentioned devise to generate HPM is the AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) radars that are becoming standard equipment in modern warplanes. AESA is more reliable and, increasingly, no more expensive than the older mechanical (a small dish that moves around inside a dome) radar. AESA is also easier and cheaper to maintain, which makes a more expensive AESA cheaper, over its lifetime, than a cheaper (to buy) mechanically scanned radar. More and more nations (including China and Russia) are manufacturing AESA radars and equipping their ships and aircraft with this stuff. All these nations are also manufacturing or developing EMP “bombs” that could be used to sabotage military bases or civilian facilities. For a long time EMP was believed to be an unlikely threat because you needed a nuclear war to create EMP. Naturally the blast and radiation damage from the nukes was seen as more of a threat than EMP. But now that has changed.

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there is also an absurd story that a big shot in the MSM tried to see if a Republican named Cruz was "authentically" Hispanic by asking him about what food he ate.

Uh, I don't know much about the guy, but I understand although his father was Cuban, his mom was American, so presumably she did the cooking. One wonders if the interviewer expected him to say he loved burritos (my sons were often assumed to love them, even though they came from the potato growing area of Colombia, and they didn't eat tortillas or other Mexican foods).

the dirty little secret is that there is not one "Hispanic" identity.

When we lived in Oklahoma, I would get phone calls from the Democrats asking me to vote for them, speaking in Spanish. The problem? The phone calls were to our unlisted number which was under my Filipino husband's "hispanic" name, and he was a Republican. Hello! Not everyone with a Hispanic name is Mexican American: some are Filipino, others are Native Americans (e.g. Geronimo was an Apache)... some are even from Spain...

Even "hispanics" of Mexican descent may not have the same social background: there are rich Mexican families who settled in Norte America when it was still Mexico, legal Mexican immigrants, who often intermarried and have lived in the US for several generations, the more recent surge of illegal Mexican immigrants, then you have the Central Americans, Cubans, and Colombians.  There is a lot of racism here: Most of the later immigrants are metziso or mainly Indians, ( which is why a recent CDC report listed diabetes as a major health threat for "Hispanics" in the USA...diabetes is epidemic among Native Americans as any IHS doc can tell you)....

Because of the high intermarriage rate, many Hispanics in the USA have "Anglo" names: Gov Richardson and George Zimmerman come to mind. And speaking of Zimmerman: Many "hispanics" from South America have black ancestry too, and don't forget that there are large Italian, German, Jewish, Arab, Iranian and Japanese communities in some south American countries.

Is Bernardo O'Higgins "hispanic"? How about Alberto Fujimora? The Pope?

Another problem with "hispanic"? does this include Brazilians or Portuguese (Sarah Hoyt of Sad Puppies fame is from that country)?

So I have a problem with "identity" politics.

And wait til the PC establishment finds about the large and growing African and West Indian populations, who are demographically changing the statistics about "Black" families.

You know, when one meat packing factory in Iowa had to let their illegal workers go, they recruited Somalians from Minnesota, not inner city welfare recipients (which in Minnesota could be black, Hmong, Indian or Anglo) it says something about the work ethic....yes there are culture clashes, but my point is that they hired immigrants... this is not a racial thing, since my Hispanic son had no problem finding work in Appalachia with it's 20 percent unemployment rate (because most of those who wanted to work had jobs or had moved away, and many of those left behind preferred welfare and often drug use to work).

And few Democrats notice that welcoming a large unregulated influx of immigrants over the southern border will lead to higher inner city black unemployment not to mention higher unemployment among blue collar Anglos and blue collar ethnics for the same reason.

so the Democratic plan is to divert black attention away from one major cause of unemployment by shouting "racism", and to ignore the large blue collar and ethnic voters and hope they vote for Hillary because they loved her husband.

And of course, the other major problem is the export of blue collar jobs overseas or to robot factories. But that is not a political problem, and rarely discussed, since opposing it doesn't work (see Luddites).


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another story that you might have missed is that the UK had an election and turned right. (well, the conservatives there are middle of the road by US standards, but it is making a lot of buzz on Republican sites especially since the polls miscalculated).

the BBC quotes Cameron as saying the election is about "renewal", whatever that means.

What this mean for the USA I have no idea.

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oh yes: Happy VE day. Did anyone in the USA celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ending of the European part of WWII? It was big in Russia..
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and the CSI story of the day