Commuting's safer now but paranoia takes over
summary: late night robberies on Jeepneys used to be common, but now people feel so safe they pull out their smartphones while riding.
Shabu addicts are now discouraged from robbing the innocent.
But the reporter worries he might be caught in the crossfire.
As if Shabu addicts never kill during a robbery (at least three elderly folks in our neighborhood were killed in robberies). And of course, our nephew killed in the crossfire when a politician ordered a hit on his rival.
related item: Female cop stops robbery on bus.
and not all murders are by cops: a lot of vigilante justice is behind murders, because of the slowness of the courts. LINK...So why was this guy on the street? Anyone? anyone?
And PhilHealth will now pay for rehab.
update: This CSM article about meth in China (from 2015) could easily describe the explosion of meth use here in thee Philippines.
in Health news, there have been a few cases of Zika here, but put it into perspective:
There were an estimated 100 thousand cases of Dengue last year plus 600 deaths.
the bishops tell Catholics to keep the environment clean and get rid of standing water that breeds moquitoes.
Of course, once we see Zika here, the SJW will use this to push abortion legalization.
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our sermon in church was about not being greedy and buying lots of stuff.
Ironically, this was the 5:30 am mass, mainly filled with poor folks who have to go to work.
But one of the major social problems here is that the working class and even the farmers whose kids went to school, have family members who go overseas to support the family.
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below I linked to a film that reports about pentecostal healings and "miracles".
we have lots of religious celebrations with bodily and mental healings here, but associated with various shrines: nearly every week there is a fiesta or festival for one saint or another, combining miraculous healings, mass, prayers, a parade and, of course, family reunions with lots of food.
This week they celebrate our Lady of Penafrancia, in Bicol.
Wikipedia link.
Well, my yuppie American types and the middle class here use Chinese herbs, message, and mindfulness to do the same thing, and they work just about as good as the holy oil of Saint whoever.
Me, I use Ibuprofen because my religion is science but never mind.
The films above discussed golden teeth, jewels, gold dust and manna appearing.
Well, given the "miracle" of rosaries turning gold in Medjugoje, I shouldn't mock (it's a natural phenomenum, of course, when the silver coating gets rubbed off the rosary wires from saying a lot of rosaries).
But similar things have been reported with saints or shrine: Such as the famous shower of rose petals at Lipa.
Andrew Greeley once quipped that once the Catholics drop something, the Protestants take it up. So Vatican II threw out miracles, (along with fasting, prayer, liturgy, and other non SJW activities) and God found others in the most unlikely places to revive the customs that help ordinary folks link with the supernatural.
Lots of "miracles" occur, albeit most of them have "natural" explanations, although often what is amazing is that they just naturally occurred after someone prayed.
I won't even go into the fact that saints need one or two certified miracles to see if God agrees with the enthusiastic public that a person is in heaven.
By certified, I mean something that science cannot explain.
So when some of our Indian nurses said the reason that Patricia WhiteBull woke it was because her family had just finished a novena to Kateri Tekakwitha. But for docs, it wasn't a miracle, but it was because she had been given an anti influenza medication that also is used for patients with parkinson's disease.
so Kateri has to wait (her certified miracle was a recovery from flesh eating bacteria)
Last week, the last half of this C2C am is a discussion with a doc who collected such "miracle" stories from other doctors.
My "miracle" story is a 2 pound premie who kept going apneic with bradycardia... we worked on her for almost an hour, with weaker and weaker responses, until we got no response at all, so I told the nurse to baptise her and we would stop CPR.
Nurse Petronilla baptised the kid "Mary" and voila, the kid took a deep gasp, and from then on was breathing normally. She even ended up going home (which is unusual: we lost nearly all babies born under 4 pounds...This was 30 plus years ago in Africa and our "incubator" was a wooden box where we used a 100 watt lightbulb to regulate the heat, and regulating the oxygen flow by giving enough for the kid to stay pink).
The local priest admonished me that I shouldn't have baptised her without mom's permission, but I figured hey, when nothing else works, WTF you try a miracle.
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