Philippines finds natural gas field

 

this is good news since a lot of money is spent importing LPG and diesel/oil.

Oil: Russia to the rescue

Lots of hysteria here about running out of oil.

But now Russia is coming to the rescue:

AI tells me: 

Based on reports from March 2026, the administration of Donald Trump issued a temporary, 30-day waiver allowing for the sale and handling of Russian oil already loaded on tankers, effectively lifting certain sanctions on Russian oil "stranded at sea".

Trumpieboy let Russia store oil in ships and now is letting them sell it. Hmm... it's almost as if he foresaw that Iran would block the strait of Homuz so did a slight of hand to undermine Iran's blackmail.

BBC site: that quotes the European experts who hate this since it helps Putin does admit this will help a lot of folk:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the "tailored, short-term" policy move would reduce the economic impact of the US-Israel war with Iran.

 

History of cats

According to this article scientists  are finding wild cats that lived near humans and ate vermin were found in a lot of the world, but these cats were never really domesticated: Most domesticated cats originated in North Africa. and spread with trade etc...even Chinese cats came via the Silk Road.

,,,,,

here is a Smithsonian article 

summary: local small cats did live with farmers before then but were not domesticated but essentially wild cats who came to eat vermin. But then the domesticated (i.e friendly) cats arrived and spread thanks to the Romans etc.: and this wasn't just true in Europe, but also in Asia:

using genetic testing, researchers have discovered that pet cats likely arrived in China around 600 C.E.—over 1,500 years after their introduction to Europe. According to a study recently published on the preprint server bioRxiv, cats were one of the many assets that traveled east on the famous Silk Road, the lengthy trading network that connected Asia with Europe between the second century B.C.E. and the 15th century C.E.

another Smithsonian article here:

An analysis revealed that the cats from before 200 B.C.E. were wildcats, and that their domestic counterparts didn’t reach Europe until about 2,000 years ago. Moreover, these feline friends came from North Africa, not east of the Mediterranean....

the other new study traced the history of domestic cats in China, differentiating them from wildcats there. The team studied 22 feline bones from 14 archeological sites in China spanning about 5,000 years. The analysis revealed that although wild leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis) lived among humans for around 3,500 years, they were a “clear example of a ‘failed domestication,’ 

in Japan, of course, cats are popular: Hello Kitty for example in today's world. and cats are mentioned in books from 900/1000 AD: They are mentioned in both Tale of Genji (where a guy steals the cat from a married girl he loves so he can feel a connection with her) and in the Pillow Book,  where the local watchdog attacks the emperor's cat and the dog is (almost) beaten to death to punish it.

Usually cats are a symbol of welcoming home, and this smiling cat that waves at you is also seen in the Philippines as a decoration

 

here in our area of the Philippines, we have feral cats who wander into our business compound to catch mice/lizards and eat what the cook leaves out for them. About four years ago, all the cats in our area disappeared (?infection) but now they have come back. 

The bad news: Our dogs kill cats. The cats that lived here when they were puppies were left alone but they will try to kill any new cat that wanders into our home. So the cats tend to stay in the storage and workshop areas, not in our house any more.

===================

update: according to AI: Maine coon cats and Norwegian forest cats are genetically related to the smaller domesticated cat we all know and love but developed their traits due to harsh conditions

Family news

a lot of worry here in the Philippines that we will run out of diesel/LPG. The price went up last week, but now it has come down a bit. It is the start of hot season, meaning that the electrical grid will be stressed by airconditioners, which are now cheap enough for the middle class (12 thousand pesos, about 220 dollars).

 In the last 20 years, we have gradually mechanized the farm using hand plows (sort of a large rototiller) and of course irrigation for the winter harvest that uses pumps. 

And over the last 20 year we have switched from hand harvesting and using our small thresher to just renting a harvester thresher to do the harvest. 

 Most of the local farmers we given their traditional land years ago, and by law we can only control a limited amount of land. So we subcontract our organic rice business to local farmers.

 The problem? They are getting old, and their kids are now educated and moving to the city. There is a danger of losing that farm land to developers, such as the big solar panel company that is rentlng/buying up good rice land to put solar panels.

Sigh. 

But more recently, the local are renting backhoes to dig up below the dirt to look for gold.

Considering that the price of fertilizer and diesel has gone up, and big businesses are busy buying and importing cheap rice from overseas which keeps the price of rice down, some farmers figure they might want to get money from these non farming schemes.

Sigh. .....

It is also the eleventh anniversary of my husband's death.

Drones are everywhere

 over 40 thousand people have died from terrorism in Nigeria, and Trump promised to help Nigerian military with training and expertise, including drones.

From

  Crux, a Catholic site.

A spokesperson for AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, told The Associated Press the U.S. troops “are working alongside their Nigerian counterparts to provide intelligence support, advisory assistance, and targeted training in support of the Nigerian Armed Forces.”

Africanews via MSN says the same story: and Nigeria is making their own drones.:
\

The US military who by law is forbidden to enter into combat here, does this type of support with the Philippine military against Islamic terrorists in the South (But not with local insurgencies that are not part of international terrorism, )

Mentioned at 4 minutes in this video:

Johnson's cat

 the rest is history podcast discusses Dr Johnson's final years. A bit depressing.

But one of the aspects was about his cat:

from Wikipedia:

Hodge the cat: 

when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, "Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;" and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, "but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed."

Johnson would buy oysters for him to eat, because as the video notes, oysters were cheap and only eaten by poor people, so maybe Johnson's cook didn't want to buy them. 

.....Today Hodge is remembered by a bronze statue, unveiled in 1997 by Sir Roger Cook, the then-Lord Mayor of London, outside the house in Gough Square he shared with Johnson and Barber, Johnson's black manservant and heir.

The statue shows Hodge sitting next to a pair of empty oyster shells atop a copy of Johnson's famous dictionary, with the inscription "a very fine cat indeed".

It has become customary for visitors that walk past the statue to place coins in the oyster shells as tokens of good luck. To mark special occasions and anniversaries a pink piece of counsel's ribbon may be seen tied to one of the oyster shells or around Hodge's neck.

the wikipedia article notes several poems or essays etc written about Johnson and his cats. 

But Hodge is not the only cat memorialized in a statue in London:

------------------------------

 I posted a long post about Dropsy, and included a description of Johnson's final days dying of Dropsy on my medical blog. Too sad.

Remember the Thai farmworker massacres

 One little covered story about Gaza attacking Israel is that they didn't just attack Israelis but attacked Thais working at a nearby farm.

Why were they there? Because in the past local Palestinians were hired, but had participated in terror attacks., so foreign workers were cheaper and safer to use.

Here is the article from 2025 about them:

Why were so many Thai farmers among the hostages held by Hamas?  

 

 Nattapong Pinta was among 31 Thais taken by the Hamas militant group. Thailand’s foreign ministry in a statement Saturday confirmed that Pinta, the last Thai hostage in Gaza, was confirmed dead. It said the bodies of two others have yet to be retrieved.

so how did they die? No one is asking. 

The ministry has said 46 Thais have been killed during the war. Thais were the largest group of foreigners held captive by Hamas

 

They were among tens of thousands of Thai workers in Israel. 

So why did I bring this up? Because a lot of ]folk living in Qatar and the middle East are foreign workers who will be kilked by Iran in this war, not just other Muslims or Israelis. 

thought for today

except in my case, it is being greeted by five dogs:

watchdogs: Two for the house/garden, two for the garage/meeting room and one who guards the stairs to the upstairs office.

Ehrlich's legacy

SciFi writer Sarah Hoyt has an essay on elite planners trying to run the lives of ordinary people: and notes that people are not widgets to be bossed around.

And she brings up the way the elites loved Ehrlich's ideas, which would limit the children to save the planet.

what actually allowed Ehrlich to do harm was this idea — which the poor man (I’m convinced he has not idea how toxic he sounds) above echoes so exactly: the idea that governments CAN AND SHOULD determine how the people of the nation should live: how many people should be born, how many die, what’s “sustainable”, what they can eat, what they can’t, how much they should exercise, what type of work they should do, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum and ad vomitus.

just like the west is ignorant of China's cultural revolution when students embrace the cancel culture, because the only film that showed what happens when the cancel culture idiots get in charge was the Three Body problem, so too, if you want to see how Ehrlich's ideas were implemented by China, you need to read Mo Yan's novvel Frog: about forced abortions.

No I don't know of anywhere to download it for free . And most reviewers seem to concentrate on the main character and don't get horrified that she not only does forced abortions, but she searches out women who try to hide their pregnancy and aborts them: And in the book, two of these women die because of this.

Presumably the reviewers didn't get upset at these deaths, but concentrate on things like character development. Sigh.