Cell phones are destroying the environment

 A lecture about it from a UK College:

Posted mainly ro listen to later on my tablet. But I have posted about this in the past.

Family news

Joy ia still visiting family in the Visayas. I thought someone was sick there, but apparently it is a family reunion to settle the will of her deceased parents who had land etc there. 

 While she is gone, Kuya is busy fixing up the house, including putting new screens on her bedroom windows (which had rusted out and had holes leaving mosquitoes inside). 

 The latest news for our rice land: One more harvest to go, but a good winter harvest. 

 But even though we are in the major rice growing part of Luzon, there has been pressure to divert land for solar energy farms.

 And now: A gold rush:

 Someone found gold nearby so a lot of farmers are digging up the superficial soil to pan for gold. Presumably they will put it back into place before planting season in June. 

 grok says there are no reports of gold in our area, although it can be found 45 km from here in Palayan. 

 Gapan City in Nueva Ecija, Philippines, does not appear to have active gold mining, significant gold deposits, or gold panning activities directly within or immediately around the city itself. Nueva Ecija province has some historical and limited association with gold, primarily in other areas:

There are mentions of small-scale or historical placer (alluvial) gold in parts of the province, such as near Palayan City (where a "Palayan Gold Mine" was referenced in older reports, located about 45 km north of Gapan City and near Cabanatuan).

Some copper-gold occurrences or prospects have been noted near Cabanatuan (close to Gapan), but these are not major operations.

........more here is history 

The province is better known for agriculture (as the "Rice Bowl of the Philippines") and tourism spots like Minalungao National Park in General Tinio, which has been poetically called a "mine of gold" due to its scenic beauty (e.g., clear river, limestone formations, and cave), not actual gold resources. Gold panning was historically restricted there to protect the environment after it became a protected area. No recent news, discoveries, or active mining operations show up specifically tied to Gapan City. Searches for gold mining, deposits, or panning in the area mostly point to jewelry shops, pawnshops dealing in gold (e.g., Cebuana Lhuillier branches, local jewelers like Helen Jewelry Shop or Chinatown Gold Center), and buy/sell posts for gold items in Gapan and nearby cities like Cabanatuan. If you're referring to buying, selling, or pawning gold jewelry/items in Gapan City, it's a commercial hub with several pawnshops and jewelry stores where gold is commonly traded (often at rates aligned with current Philippine gold prices, around PHP 5,000–8,000+ per gram depending on karat and market fluctuations). If this query is about something more specific—like a particular news story, investment, historical site, or local business—feel free to provide more details for a deeper look!

The clergy are silent

Sigh. IN our prayers

How to fix a leaky Submarine

Instapundit has a comment on fixing leaks on a post about NASA trying to stop hydrogen leaks from their latest rocket.

But I am old enough to remember another story on how a common radiator repair fluid saved a sub:

Epstein was here (Philippines)

\]]

ABSCBN article states 

congress plans to do an investigation: “A recent report indicates that email exchanges from the Epstein files show that Epstein and his associates engaged a Philippine-based team to clean up hisonline image after his conviction as a sex offender,” Elago said. ///The investigation shall cover allegations of media manipulation and reputation management conducted from the Philippines supposedly to shield Epstein from accountability.

many groups help the local cops and charity outreaches, including NGOs anc churches, but as this report notes: there have been times when abusers infiltrate the charity outreaches to abuse children or to make money. 

Sigh. One of the problems, and not just here in the Philippines 

 

.

...this is from two years ago:

.government report on sex trafficking:... https://philja.judiciary.gov.ph/files/journal/vol6issue21.pdf

Miracles we haz them

5 ,,

,,,Bishop Sheen was a popular Catholic speaker who had his own TV show, which you can still find on you tube. A bit flamboyant for today's laid back media, but very informative and often very funny.  Lots of people in the USA think he was a saint, so most are happy that he might be declared one by the church.

Trivia fact about him:  Martin Sheen chose his name for his stage name. 

But coming back to the baby who lived: as a doc I see why this incident is called a miracle, but, is this a miracle? such things happen in medicine although very rare....

the medical explanation is that the hemoglobin in babies carries oxygen differently so prolonged lack of oxygen is not as dangerous as it is for adults, but betting a baby back after a one hour delay is unusual, and getting a child who recovered fully after this is sort of a miracle too, so I guess you could call it a miracle.

as a doc, I did have a similar case of full recovery of a baby.

when I worked in rural Africa 40 years ago. Premature babies usually didn't survive, and the only incubator was a wooden box with a glass lid, where we controlled the temperature with light bulbs and supplied oxygen via a tube.

One Christmas, we had a  three pound baby who was struggling to survive.,

When she started gasping, the nurse called me to help. 

We increased her oxygen and started to stimulate her, rubbing her to encourage her to breathe. But then suddenly she gasped and died: i.e. turned pale and went weak. So we started CPR. 

She did come back but her heartbeat kept going off and on and she was not breathing. Finally, after about a half hour, she again  turned pale and lacked a heartbeat, 

so since nothing was working I figured it was time  to do something illogical,  I instructed the nurse: Petronilla, baptize her. So she was baptized Mary,,, at which point she started breathing and moving a bit and within five minutes she was breathing on her own and looked normal.

A miracle from being hit with cold water on her head? I don't know. But she did recover and eventually went home.

Now there is another part to this story.

In Africa, unless both parents were baptized Catholic and married in the church, we did not baptize babies because their parents might not bring them up in the church. So the local priest, hearing what I had done, was very annoyed, especially since the father was the local shaman and not a Christian. ]

But as I  explained: well, we tried everything else so I figured it was time to ask for a miracle. 

 LOL

In medicine, we do see a lot of coincidences: people who should live but who die, but also those who we thought would die but survived...

when I was in medical school one teacher pointed this out, ,and said that was why few doctors were pious, but most did believe in a higher power and an ultimate reason for all the things we saw, both good and bad.

Family news

 We held Kuya's birthday party so we have been busy.

He is larger than the average Filipino, so I checked out the used clothing merchants a few times in the last two weeks. I ended up buyint 12 polo type shirts and figure half will fit him. The rest he will give to staff or to me since I wear large shirts as tunics or to sleep in.

Joy is busy teaching business to the farmers in her coop and working with the government outreach. Farmers tend to be poor and their kids are leaving the farm land for better jobs, so the government is trying to upgrade their ability to raise crops that make a profit, for example organic rice and vegetables, which Joy helps by doing the marketing for the coop.

Myself, I had been weak and home bound for six months then suddenly got my ability to walk etc improved last week. I even managed to shop at the mall and go to church, something I had not done for months.

we are in the cool season, and the heat will sart next month, and won't  get better til the monsoon hits in late May, when the crops will be planted.

Our crops from the winter season have almost been harvested, so Kuya has been improving the house to keep the staff busy and employed until it is time to work at the farm.

more conspiracy theories anyone?

.....

 

........\

when Rogan calls something evil, one wonders where are all the clergy in this? 

Cardinal Vigano says it''s members include some in the Vatican. article from last year, before the files were released:

PBS assures us he abused girls but wasn't part of a sex abuse

ring. 

Prosecuation memos, case summaries and other documents made public in the department's latest release of Epstein-related records show that FSome allegations couldn't be verified, investigators wroteBI agents and federal prosecutors diligently pursued potential coconspirators. ...No videos or photos showed Epstein victims being sexually abused, none showed any males with any of the nude females, and none contained evidence implicating anyone other than Epstein and Maxwell, then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey wrote in an email for FBI officials last year

 one does wonder what would have been found if these files had been examined years ago.

One hopes no one starts a war to distract the public from this corruption.