They went to the mall and o the nearby city square, but spent much of their time inside her air conditioned bedroom talking or watching Korean tele-dramas on the computer.
They went to Manila to catch a ride home. The mom is a flight attendant for a local airline. Joy gets back tonite, so they won't get to here until late tomorrow.
I am avoiding the headlines.
Why are doctors told to "Push" global warming and take time out of their busy practices to demonstrate? We have no expertise in climate science, and there isn't much we can do about it. Ditto for the Catholic church. Stop the air conditioning? Walk don't drive? Be less greedy? Eat green ? (uh, if this was done, the poor couldn't afford the food and the methane would rise from manure and using flooding to stop weeds when you grow rice, but never mind.. )
in the meanwhile, the real problems for our patients are being ignored: The breakup of the family with it's problems affecting our children and elders. (in the US this is from easy divorce laws and the sexual revolution: Here in the Philippines, it is because the parents work overseas because of a lack of local jobs).
Drugs are a symptom of these moral problems, and we docs see the side effects: abused and neglected kids (in the Philippines, street kids) who often take drugs to get rid of their psychological pain.
But if you read the papers in the US, they talk as if getting high is both harmless and fun. Are people taking drugs to be happy? Ah, but like the side effects of the broken families of the sexual revolution, the side effects are ignored.
The political wars in the US are getting crazy: on the other hand, that last part is starting to lose steam: As Dilbert notes:
In January of this year, President Trump’s critics were marching in the streets because they believed he was about to go full-Hitler. Or maybe he was just crazy, and about to do something dangerously stupid.
Today their biggest complaint is that President Trump hasn’t shared his tax returns with the public.
oh well, it says a lot that Trumpie boy's pushing war against North Korea is getting less opposition than the fact he won't push to let men in the girls' room.
In the meanwhile, the US press shouted about an attack on some tourist areas here in the Philippines. I didn't see a lot in our papers, and after reading Strategy Page, I realized why: It was a bust.
What has shattered Abu Sayyaf morale was the spectacular collapse of a major effort to kidnap Western tourists on Bohol and Cebu islands in the central Philippines. This plan involved three Abu Sayyaf factions coordinating their efforts but the plan came apart on the 11 th when police were alerted (by concerned locals) about the presence of armed strangers. The subsequent gun battles killed the experienced Abu Sayyaf leader in charge of the operation and his key assistants. With that most of the remaining Abu Sayyaf members realized they were in bad shape and there was no way out.
and one other thing they note is that the government is making sure ransom is not being paid: Ransom for foreigners is one big source of their ability to make war.
the local paper notes that our farm area is shrinking because they are fixing the infrastructure for industrialization. True, alas. But this means our locals can stay home and work instead of going to Saudi etc. to get a job.
and a lot of those selling their land are those who got the land via land reform 50 years ago, but now are old and their kids don't want to farm, so are selling their land. We bought back a lot of the land our family lost to land reform, but there is a limit on how much a person can own, so we can't own any more. But this means we hire farmers (often from the poorer Visayas) to do the work, while subcontracting local small farmers to grow what we need while agreeing to sell us their crop, and in return we help by lending them tractors, handplows, high quality seedlings, mechanical threshers etc, all of which could not be afforded by a family with only a small farm.
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