Stuff around the net

Mainly bookmarked for later reading.

PapaFrancisco says when consumerism fills the heart, you can't see your brother, you look away when your greed destroys the environment, and sometimes you may even be willing to destroy the child in your womb who gets in the way of your getting more stuff.

Heh. It's only a matter of time until the liberals discover he is not the PC pope they wanted.

and oh yes: he adds that if you really knew god personally, you'd be joyful, not a sourpuss...

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Ring around the sun... we know about the asteroid belt, but now they have found a ring of dust near Venus.

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WAGD: Astronomy cast has a podcast on solar flares.

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What was the demon behind the CT school shooting? Lanza destroyed his hard drive, so maybe we'll never know.

But one commenter read the entire report and has some disturbing observations.
The rage of abused children is a common problem: One of our nurses on "the res" said most of the men in her AA group had been sexually abused by relatives or in residential schools...

and the subtext is that it is almost impossible to get a relative into emergency psychiatric hospitalization when he starts threatening violence (been there, done that)...


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Fossilized sap shows oxygen levels were lower in the past.

Amber as a time machine.
I never realized that amber was beautiful until I visited the shop of a silversmith and saw necklaces that used high quality amber. (Most "amber" I had seen was low quality or fake). And the Baltic Amber trade in neolithic times was pretty brisk.

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Radio4 podcasts on the Gettysburg address and the anniversary of the deaths of CSLewis/Huxley.

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Anderson Cooper now is popular in the Philippines.Actually, he is fair and a good reporter, but a lot of locals complain that he compared the Philippine response to that in Japan, ignoring the differences in terrain and wealth and infrastructure (not to mention culture).

And a lot of commenters are suggesting better housing might have helped: well, yes and no: In a 20 foot storm surge, you could drown in your two story house.

And the answer to the flimsy huts is decent concrete houses.

In our farm area, when I first visited in 1990, most houses were bamboo or wood...as prosperity increased, most of these were replaced with ugly but substantial concrete block houses with tin roof. So the answer to poor housing is prosperity.

In our area, the prosperity is partly from land reform, and infrastructure help to improve small farm income (e.g. organic rice is sold at a higher price than regular rice, and the better roads mean it's easy to send veggies to Manila to sell)
But the increased prosperity is also because the kids moved to Manila or worked in Saudi and sent money to the family to build a new house and for their siblings school fees.
 

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Zimbabwe tells foreign shops to close.
the shops will then be given to locals by the gov't.

The paper said Nigerians and the Chinese who flooded the country in recent years were likely to be the biggest casualties as they set up shops dealing in various wares in almost every town.

uh oh: he's made the UK angry and now is going to make China angry...

These moves are to bribe his supporters help the local economy...