The Philippines did their part

the Korean war is usually ignored by the US history types, mainly because it showed outright aggression by the communists was a reality.

And when it is remembered, usually it is seen as US vs North Korea, not only ignoring how China "helped" their allies, but that it was a UN sponsored war, so other countries helped defend the country.

and one only has to look at the prosperity of South Korea to see that the war was just (even though Marxist professors in the South are influential in persuading the students the US was evil in doing this.)

So if you are watching this on your Samsung phone, one reason is because the Philippines did their part.





this is not the only time that surrounded Philippine military helping the UN forces stood their ground:

The famous incident in the Golan Heights, when the "rebels" surrounded UN forces and demanded surrender resulted in the contingent from Fiji laying down their arms after being ordered to do this by the UN commander.


The head of the UN peacekeepers also ordered the Filipino contingent to surrender, but the Filipino peacekeepers refused, fought back, and eventually managed to escape.





Hmmm... so what is Molon Labe in Tagalog?

this is the Filipino equivalent to "Blackhawk Down", where the UN just couldn't get their act together to help the peacekeepers.

and ironically the UN types blasted the Filipinos because they put the Fijian soldiers who did surrender into danger.

by the way: unlike Korea, where the war was ideological, this was done because the rebels needed money, and figured this was the easy way to do it (they eventually got 25 million dollars for the prank).

Reality check: children

Mike, Herlinda, and grandkids

we who are grand moms (and great grandmoms) sigh as we watch our babies grow up and have their own lives (and own children... and grandchildren).

 quote of the week:

“Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger's touch.

But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-cheeked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body.

But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says "I am," and forms the core of personality.

In the second year, the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within.

And "I am" grows, too. Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through the translucent flesh.

The bones of the face emerge at six, and the soul within is fixed at seven. The process of encapsulation goes on, to reach its peak in the glossy shell of adolescence, when all softness then is hidden under the nacreous layers of the multiple new personalities that teenagers try on to guard themselves.

In the next years, the hardening spreads from the center, as one finds and fixes the facets of the soul, until "I am" is set, delicate and detailed as an insect in amber.”

 ― Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

Ebola, Polio, and other third world realities

Can Polio be eradicated? CDC article discusses.

Since the Global Polio Eradication Initiative began, the number of reported WPV cases has declined from an estimated 350,000 WPV cases in 125 countries during 1988 to 66 cases in two countries with ongoing endemic transmission during 2019 (as of August 20, 2019); an estimated 18 million paralytic poliomyelitis cases have been prevented during the past 30 years.

I am old enough to remember the polio epidemics in the 1950s and had two class mates who were left with residual leg weakness from it.

my medical blog has a longer post on this.
--------------------

The Ebola epidemic is still going on: 3000+ cases so far, which actually I think is good news considering the poverty and lack of facilities in the area.

StrategyPage has a long article discussing the outbreak and includes a lot of the background of what's going on: the wars and violence in the area, the big shot who stole a lot of the money, (italics mine)...and then there is the controversy about using a second vaccine since they don't have enough of the approved one.

But there are unsung heroes in the fight:

During the week that ended on September 22, Congo’s health teams conducted 2,546,148 Ebola virus screenings. Since August 2018 Congolese teams have conducted over 98 million screenings. That impressive number indicates Congolese health teams have done a lot of potentially dangerous work. Still, experience has shown the risk of Ebola transmission as very high at national (in Congo) and regional levels (central Africa) but low at the global level.

this is the link to my medical blog, and to another essay about the vaccines, including one being made by China. China has a lot invested in mines in other parts of the DRC, so are taking no chances.

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we are having a Dengue epidemic here in the Philippines (our cousin's wife just got over a case).

Yes, there is a vaccine, but only for selected cases.

the government here pushed the then experimental Dengue vaccine on kids, and because it was given to some who should not have gotten it, some kids died.

As a doctor, I probably would have approved of using the still experimental vaccine given the significant number of deaths from Dengue, but hey, this is the Philippines, so a lot of ordinary folks suspected a small "gift" changed hands, or that we were being used as guinea pigs for the big shot drug company to see if the vaccine worked.

As a result, some parents here stopped having their kids vaccinated, so we now not only have a measles outbreak and new polio cases here...and now they just diagnosed a case of diphtheria.

Sigh.

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Not medical per se, but I did post this essay about the PC including the Catholic progressives in Germany projecting their "noble savage" fantasies on Amazon tribes, ignoring Amazon infanticide controversy, and how the PC defend it, because "multiculturalism".

this exasperates me, because small interventions would enable the children to be brought up without problems.

Of course, the elites won't say it, but probably believe in eugenics:

and maybe because if they point fingers at poor tribal people in danger of starvation culling their weak, they might have to admit the trend in the modern west to kill off by late abortion every child diagnosed with Down's syndrome (and of course now, killing off inconvenient Grandmoms who are not suffering, merely senile).

The difference is that if given a choice, the tribal people would try to save their children:/

This was also my experience in Africa.

One tribe I worked with in Africa traditionally killed twins in the past, probably because experience showed that these kids would die of malnutrition, so were considered cursed...  as soon as infant formula enabled moms to feed their twins, infanticide disappeared.

in our hospital (this was 40 years ago), we had a "Nutrition village": when an underweight child was found at Baby Clinic screening or screening by our village health workers, the mom and child were encouraged to come and we would feed up the kid, while instructing mom on high protein food etc. to feed her child. Many of the children we had to feed up were, alas, twins. 

There was enough food for the kids, but once the children were weaned, they did not get enough protein in their diet.

Prevention of protein malnutrition was a major outreach by our hospital, because once they developed signs of Kwashiorkor ( the mortality was high even with treatment...

When such a child wasted away and died in the past, often witchcraft was suspected, so education was part of the outreach.

before you point fingers to the "indigenous", however, remember in the Starz series Outlander there is a subplot of a child believed to be a changeling left out in the cold, or watch this "history guy" video;

The Fountain of Changi

When we spent the weekend in Singapore, we were planning to find a hotel in town, but one of our friends told us to just use the hotel inside the airport. We did, and the room was small but the bed was queensized and soft, and we had a TV and wifi and shower, and free breakfast, and since our return flight home left at midnight, we didn't have to worry about traveling to the airport late at night

But the brand new Changi airport also has a huge mall, so we could eat and shop. All sorts of food in restaurants (even Korean Pizza and a Turkish Mexican restaurant). What did we eat? I had a hamburger: here in the provinces we only have McD and Jolibee, so a thick burger was wonderful.

But the airport also has an indoor garden with a fountain coming down from the roof: At night the fountain is lit up with various colours and music.




and there is a "skywalk" where you can walk above the garden on a mesh (No, I didn't try it).

Singapore is full of gardens and beauty.

All of this reminded me of Gondolin, with it's towers and fountains.

"...Then did the throng return within the gates and the wanderers with them, and Tuor saw they were of iron and of great height and strength. Now the streets of Gondolin were paved with stone and wide, kerbed with marble, and fair houses and courts amid gardens of bright flowers were set about the ways, and many towers of great slenderness and beauty builded of white marble and carved most marvellously rose to the heaven. Squares there were lit with fountains and the home of birds that sang amid the branches of their aged trees, but of all these the greatest was that place where stood the king's palace, and the tower thereof was the loftiest in the city, and the fountains that played before the doors shot twenty fathoms and seven in the air and fell in a singing rain of crystal: therein did the sun glitter splendidly by day, and the moon most magically shimmered by night.

yes, I know: it should be reminding me of the hidden city of the Emperor of China, but unlike the forbidden city, most of the city gardens, and the airport, are open to one and all.

My point is that, while it is correct for the Pope and the Green types to lash out against excess and imply we should live a green life in yurts eating bread and water (or here in Asia, rice and tea), that if you stress only simplicity and helping the poor, (which, by the way, has been my life's work) as the way to serve the Lord, you are impoverishing God's reality: because God is not only the Healer and the comforter (and the Father and the priest and the shepherd): he is also the great artist and creator of beauty.

So some people are gifted the vocation as co-creators: God's nature is full of variety and beauty, so too men who are given the vocation of artist, musician, technician, engineer, writer, etc. so they too can create beauty that remind one of the beauty of heaven. As Tolkien wrote:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.

LINK to Roger Scruton video on why beauty matters 

Yup. they take care of their own

Here, President Aquino aka Mr Clean, tried to prosecute our lovely ex president Gloria, for somehow getting wealthy in office (not to mention the Hello Garci vote stealing scandal and the ZTE bribe from China which was stopped when the press found out about it).

She promptly said she needed to leave the country for neck surgery, (a common way to flee justice here) and when they stopped her, let her stay in house arrest for a couple of years. Lot of other corrupt stuff happened on her watch, too many for me to keep up with. 

ah, but then the UN intervened and the Supreme court let her case disappear.

Of course, here everyone is related to everyone else, which is why all the big shots get away with corrupt practises, and when they are indicted, they usually get off scot free. One result is economic stagnation so that our hard working middle class emigrates overseas for jobs.

But in Arroyo's case, the "friends" who got her out went beyond the usual family connections in the Philippines:

Wikipedia:

In a case filed by human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, the UN Working Group decided Arroyo's hospital detention arbitrary and violative of the international law on human rights.

Let me count the links.

Mrs. Arroyo was a classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown.
Amal Clooney, is the wife of actor George, a huge Clinton backer.
and Arroyo got into office by a coup against Erap, a popular president, ex movie star, who didn't know you didn't take gifts and locals think he was removed by the global elite for not cooperating with their schemes; the elites merely said he was removed because he was corrupt. (he was arrested, and years later pardoned, and then became Mayor of Manila... no one ever seems to go away they just get recycled)

my point is that the elites take care of their own, and one reason I can't do a good job reporting on such things is that I don't really know who is related to whom, which is usually the key to knowing why people get away with this.

In the USA, one does not expect such things to happen, but you know, there are a lot of people in Congress who got rich somehow, and others whose spouses or family got great deals that would not be available to ordinary folks.

So when an unknown "whistleblower" who did not have direct access to a telephone call (i.e. was reporting a rumor), why did everyone in the MSM and Democratic party say impeachment before there was any real evidence?

Maybe because it's common knowledge that Joe Biden bragged about pressuring the Ukraine to fire a certain prosecutor or else. 




or, if you really want your head to spin, maybe it's not about Biden but Crowdstrike.

and you can go and read all about it there, because I have a life to live, but in a nutshell, Crowdstrike claimed the DNC server was hacked by Russia, so is the key behind the Russia conspiracy.

and if I didn't live in the Philippines and know the depth of corruption can stop criminal charges because friends help friends I would be like most Americans and just wonder why the hysterical twitterverse and other activists are so intent on pushing this thru.

and the news is full of this hysteria, but on CTH, they have the reports of all the presidents Trump met at the UN, with summaries of trade deals and new alliances being done. LINK LINK LINK LINK LINK LINK

But I guess just doing presidential things is not newsworthy.

and the winners? Grannie Warren, of course: And probably Trumpieboy, since most of us have had it with all the manipulative hysteria thrown at us by the MSM.

Traction alopecia

follow up to previous article:

the tight braiding that is fashionable in Black women can cause traction alopecia.

this is when the hair follicle is stressed by the hair being pulled: by tight braids, by it's own weight (e.g. long hair) from extentions, from hair weaving, from Pony tails, buns, and even local pressure from tight hats.

Wikipedia article.

Chinese Christianity

Sandro Magister has an article asking why there is no discussion of the "Chinese model" of Christianity instead of an (imaginary) one being pushed as the "Amazon synod". He includes an essay link about this history.

Essentially it says that locals kept the church traditions open even when the priest was only visiting a few times a year.

Like most things in the church, it's not new: much of South America have few priests in rural area, and for hundreds of years, Catholics in England and Ireland were forbidden to practice the faith. (remember the "priest holes" in that James Bond movie Skyfall? That's where they hid the priest when the law came looking for him).
In Japan, Christians also were priestless but kept the faith for 300 yearsl
And in Korea, the church was spread by converts who learned about it when they were studying in China.

here is a Chinese history podcast about Christianity in China:



toward the end of the lecture, he discusses how the church debated how much to "inculturate" the Church with Chinese traditions. (they lost: No Chinese language mass allowed). But inculturizations, i.e. how much of the local beliefs should be allowed and which should be discouraged arguments go back to Pope Gregory the Great and the debate whether or not to allow some beloved benign customs into Church practice when they preached to the Anglo Saxons. Indeed, some say it started with Paul.

here's another history lecture:

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and right now? Millions of Chinese Christians, who were converted by their own people.

the dirty little secret is that Protestant Christianity is being spread via home churches, but are now facing a persecution (UK Guardian article) as Xi tries to unite China under him and is trying to make churches subservient to the communist party.

the article predates the Hong Kong protests which has a core of Christian believers as it's base, but does point out how some churches dare to point out corruption in the government. 

and it is ironic that the Pope essentially told Catholics to obey the government which means making the Catholic church there a puppet of the government. But it didn't work: the government there is prosecuting the Catholic anyway.

Sigh.

Who loves you, baby?

yup. The four dogs did their happy dance to see me when I came back yesterday.

it's nice to be home.
(Headsup VoxCantoris)

Pippi Longstocking back in style

what's with the braids?

If Climatepuppet Greta came into my office when I was a physician, I would tell her where to learn how to put on makeup and get a haircut and get her into counseling to help her with her self esteem issues and depression.

Did my other patients wear braids? well, a few of the "religious" type patients did, and ex hippies usually had a single braid, but there weren't a lot who wore the double braids reminiscent of Hitler Yutes 

whoops: not pc. I mean reminiscent of Pippi Longstocking.

then I came across this lecture, telling people with disabilities it's okay to have sex (uh, does she know how often those with developmental disabilities are sexually exploited?).
so why are these ladies wearing braids? To look ugly? or is it the new "PC"?




wearing double braids can remind one of the "good old days" when married ladies braided their hair across their heads like a crown:

My Objibwe neighbors would wear braids when they would dress up for celebrations: but not usually at the clinic.

and braids are still stylish in the Black community:

Braiding in the black community (and in Africa braided hair was and is common: at least in more traditional/rural areas) was a practical way to wear your unruly hair without all the mess of trying to straighten it out to look fashionable (i.e. look like a white girl).



the multiple braids in black fashion are now being used by white girls trying to look hip, and some in the black community are not happy about it.

 Braid Bar, CC BY-NC-ND

With white British models Moss and Jones as the faces of the ad campaign, Selfridges’ Braid Bar has been accused of endorsing a white standard of beauty. Across social media, critics are calling out this lack of diversity while crucially noting Selfridges’ additional miscalculation: the appropriation of black culture. The point being that this style of hair braiding is central to black female identity.

which is of course, nonsense. Braided hair is seen in ancient Egyptian art and Indian art, and the neolithic European Venus von Willendorf idol shows her wearing corn rolls.

But when teenager who has a flat affect whose braids make her look like a child starts spouting she hates you for being evil, well, it reminds one of this iconic story 

https://horrorpedia.com/2017/06/19/children-of-the-corn-runaway-2017-horror-film-movie-overview-cast-plot/

Steven King call your office: the kids are back.

Blood Cobalt

senseofEventsblog has lots of links, including to articles on the "blood cobalt" that is used to run your cellphone and environmenatally correct "green" electric car. 

 A report by Amnesty International first revealed that cobalt mined by children was ending up in products from several companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Samsung.

he adds:

 More links to the enslavement of children in the Congo: 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/09/26/blood-batteries-cobalt-and-the-congo/#6c3ed237cc6e
https://www.iisd.org/story/green-conflict-minerals/
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/19/children-as-young-as-seven-mining-cobalt-for-use-in-smartphones-says-amnesty
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/Child-labour-behind-smart-phone-and-electric-car-batteries/

The Climate Change Cult is a religion that does not turn away from child sacrifice.

one other observation of Singapore: It was hazy there: the haze came from the burning of fields in Indonesia and Malaysia.

here is a background article from SCMP 2017: traditional slash and burn agriculture by local farmers, and also now by big plantation owners to clear land.

China is the future

I just got back from Singapore, and if my observations are correct, then I must suggest that China is the future: not just the PRC China, but the "other" Chinas (HongKong, Taiwan, Macau, and Singapore) and the Chinese diaspora that runs the economies of SEAsia and starting to take over the economies of Central Asia.

they might not support the communist government of China, but they have racial solidarity with all Chinese.

(and don't give me that nonsense about "white privilege" as if all European Americans came from the same culture: we ethnic Americans who remembered years of actual discrimination weren't considered "white" until the PBS/NPR types started pushing the meme 20 years ago).

why do I say China is the future?

Because while the PC in America keeps people browbeaten trying to make them feel guilty about sins in the distant past, major and minor, China is stressing the future, ignoring recent and ongoing atrocities of their history.

and while lilly white school girls funded by "green" corporations aiming to make a bundle of money are lecturing US Congress on global warming, and how we should give up modern cars and air conditioners, and go back to living in Yurts and eat low protein diets, Singapore is showing the way of the future in a high tech society... that is rich enough to actually be "green"... a friend in Singapore even bragged that, when Malaysia threatened to cut off their water supply, that Singapore just developed desalinization plants, which now supply one third of their water.

this is big news, but like the desalinization plants in the Middle East and Israel, is ignored by the MSM who prefer to moan about problems, not solutions.

In other words, it is not just the fancy stuff seen by tourists that make China powerful: It is the positive attitude that they will run the world and that they deserve to run the world because they work hard.

(just don't notice their Filipina nannies earning only 300 dollars a month, nor notice all those other migrant workers who live in their own area of town where we were warned about being robbed). LINK LINK2 LINK

meanwhile, back in Hong Kong

China's communist gov't is using their net citizens to doxx the protesters.

On 18 of September, the China Central Television (CCTV) published a video on its official Weibo account, in which it urged others to use the site to “take off the masks” of the Hong Kong ”rioters”.

The doxing website, was originally registered as hkleaks.org around the end of August and recently moved to a Russian hosting service upon complaint against privacy violations:

Selina Cheng 鄭嘉如

✔@selina_cheng

Doxxing site hkleaks. ru hosted on Russian domain, using a Russian email (Yandex) & Russian DDOS protection service (ddos-guard) posts personal details of protesters, activists. It recently added info of an HK01 employee & other Apple Daily staff, editorial and non-ed

the idea is to get the western MSM to swallow their propaganda and ignore that one quarter of Hong Kong's citizens have joined the protests.

and China's aggression is not just against the citizens of Hong Kong:

StrategyPage describes the massive aggression to steal the ilets/shoals in the West Philippine sea despite the International court ruling that this area belongs to the Philippines.

Because the US doesn't want war, Obama pressured the then president not to oppose them when they chased away fishermen and dug up the seabed to build artificial islands.

Duterte, faced with these militarized islands, tried to make nice but China just reneged on the deal and tricked him.

it's not just about the oil and fishing reserves in the area, but these militarized islands could block the sealanes to other East Asian countries.

Vietnam also suffers major losses and other nations like Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea are threatened to a lesser extent. The Chinese claims are not confined to the South China Sea but aim to expand Chinese control to much of the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean. As a result India, Singapore and Malaysia feel threatened as well.

the article also mentions the non military push back against Chinese aggression in the form of spying (my federal OPM file was hacked by China), but in stealing intellectual property:

The Americans have gone to war with China, but not militarily. The Americans, and many other Chinese trading partners, have been accumulating grievances because of Chinese economic crimes and rampant (and ongoing) espionage efforts. China steals patent protected property as well as trade secrets (unpatented knowledge that was created at great expense.) China is currently caught between the after-effects of economic misbehavior inside China and American demands to reform and restitution. The U.S. is imposing tariffs and other trade penalties on China and the Chinese leadership is feeling the heat and unable, so far, to come up with an adequate defense.

not mentioned: That the greedy capitalists in the west decided to move western jobs to China to make a profit, and envisioned a future world where some people would identify as world citizens and run the place, so screw the ordinary folks whose jobs are lost.

 No, I didn't get this idea from a right wing (or a socialist) web site, but from the 1992 book the Work of Nations by Robert Reich (Clinton's sect of labor). Read the whole thing, that predicts how the international elite planned today's world, and maybe the Trump hatred is because he is representing those left behind by the elites' plans.

on the other hand, the good news is that by moving blue collar/ factory jobs to China and other countries, mainly in Asia, the elite capitalist establishment did lift a billion people out of poverty.

so will Trumpieboy's sanctions cause poverty to return? Will there be a world wide recession because of his policies?


Right now, China is being aggressive against outsider countries partly to get power over the economy of east and central Asia, but also to distract the population from the corruption inside the country... and with African Swine Flu decimating the pig population there, a food crisis could result (not just China but Vietnam and the Koreas, and now a few cases in the Philippines) and complicate matters.

Cultural references

Humor is hard to understand if one doesn't get the cultural references: For example, I once found a Hindu friend watching the old TV show "HeeHaw" and not laughing, and said she was trying to understand the jokes.

Just the name "Hee Haw" has a double meaning: the noise of laughter, and the noise of a donkey. But donkeys are stupid, so it also means you are making fun of the stupid people in the comedy sketches.

In the past, most Americans knew the cultural references that came from Shakespeare and the Bible.

But now, do they study these things? My granddaughter at her uberelite Canadian high school did not read shakespeare or Dickens or Homer, but modern books that were read for the political overtones

Catholics always opposed the daily bible reading in public schools, but the censorship of biblical stories means that often one has to use movies as a reference instead.

An example of a Biblical joke from the BabylonBee via Instapundit:

NEVER LOOK BACK: White Girl Turned Into Pillar Of Pumpkin Spice After Looking Back At Starbucks.

this is only funny if you know the story of Lot's wife, who turned back to look at Sodom being destroyed and turned into a pillar of salt, with the modern reference to Pumpkin spice coffee, which is a big thing but only served during the autumn at Starbucks etc.
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Here is a more modern reference, which I suspect will be missed by the younger generation:

from PJMedia on the shoddy "news" "reporting" by the NYTimes about a vague rumor being used to smear a conservative Supreme court justice:

Howard Kurtz called the piece a "train wreck," noting that the allegation was based on nothing more than "one second-hand source," whom they never even spoke with directly. Instead, they heard it "from two unnamed 'officials' who had spoken to him." In other words, "My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Brett whip out his penis at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious."

that is a Ferris Bueller reference:



as for the accusation: not only are there no witnesses, but one wonders if all those SJW who hyperventillated over this were ever 19 years old and got a bit naked. Woodstock, anyone?
----------------

the anti Trump protesters plan to ridicule him with both the Trump baby and the Trump chicken baloons.

but one wonders why the PC multiculturalist types in San Francisco were not aware that the latter balloon could be interpreted, not as a "chicken" i.e. "coward", but as "Trump rooster": which here in East Asia, has a completely different connotation: because cockfighting is a very popular sport, and believe me, you don't want to mess with a fighting cock/rooster.

The "Trump Chicken/Rooster" balloon meme started when a Chinese mall had one of these balloons outside to celebrate the Chinese new year of the Fire Chicken.

The Fire Rooster is an extremely strong-willed and proactive person...  The Fire Rooster is able to handle big tasks very well and is very good at multi-tasking. ... The Rooster has a flamboyant and colourful personality and is thorough in all they do. They are always organized and like to plan their various activities well in advance. They are usually highly intelligent and very well read with a good sense of humour They love discussion and enjoy taking part in debates. They have no hesitation in saying what is on their mind. 

hmm... sounds about right. 

----------------------------
in unrelated news, Newsweek prints this 20+ year old accusation:

Donald Trump Stole Pancakes and Forgot a Relative Was Dead While Visiting Family, Cousin Claims

Yes, an impeachable offense.

On the other hand, it doesn't pass the "smell" test: as Trump pointed out when they accused him of a lewd action in Moscow: He is a clean freak.

One doubts he would put cold, greasy pancakes (unlike scones, Pancakes are fried in oil or butter) into his suit pocket unless they were cleanly wrapped in plastic.

so probably not true, and even if it is true, it's not big news.
and then the experts wonder why trust in the MSM is at an all time low...

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family news

I spent all day at the nearby immigration office getting my paperwork done.

Now I only have to go to Manila to the embassy to confirm my pension and to get another paper, and then I have to leave the country to reenter to start my retirement visa.

I'd say it is crazy to leave and return a day later just to make the paper work accurate, but one of our doctors had to do the same thing in the USA. It's easier to reenter and start from scratch than to try to revise the paper work.

Sheesh.

Miscelaneous musings

I had linked to one of Andrew Greeley's R rated novels (Virgin and Martyr) in an earlier post, so I decided to dig into my library and reread the book "Irish Whiskey".

Even though it was written in 1998, it had a federal investigator framing the hero of the book because she hated all men after her husband left her and went on crusades against the bad guys:
 Except in this case, he was innocent, so she resorted to leaking the grand jury information.

Hmm... that sounds like a certain DA who went against the Catholic bishops (some say too aggressvily) but crashed and burned when she pulled these shennaigans against big city politicians who had connections and ended up in jail.

So was Greeley psychic?

The novel also has a scene where two FBI agents invaded the hero's apartment at 3 am to arrest him and search the place and pull
a gun on him.

If Greeley rewrote it today, he would have sent a fully armed SWAT team, complete with CNN cameras who just happened to be in the neighborhood.

Roger Stone, call your office.

And all through this subplot was the idea that the FBI and federal prosecutors would go after a fall guy who would run out of money and finally do a plea bargain (or in some cases, to save an innocent relative) in order to enhance their resumes of being crime fighters. Greeley mentions Dan Rostenkowski twice in the novel, but in today's news another name comes to mind.

Michael Flynn, call your office. They got your story here too,

I didn't notice any of these things the first time I read it, probably because the real plot is about a gangster's empty grave, and the novel is full of romantic soft porn, but never mind.

and I should defend the FBI, who did the murder investigations on "the res" (see the movie "Wind River") and tried their best in a very difficult situation. One hopes the upcoming book about the Osage murders will help their now flagging reputation.

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Afghanistan hasn't changed much in 2400 years. From Ancient Warfare podcast: Alexander (the Great) in Bactria (the present day Afghanistan):

“I am engaged in a land of a leonine and brave people, where every foot of the ground is like a wall of steel confronting my soldiers. You have brought only one Alexander into the world, but every mother in this land has brought an Alexander into the world.” – Alexander the Great, in a letter written to his mother Olympias from Bactria

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Wikipedia was down. Cyberwire discusses possible reasons.

but here is the real question:

Did your smart refrigerator take out Wikipedia?

An entity known on Twitter as @UkDrillas has claimed responsibility for the attack, though this has not been confirmed....]

Haaretz also quoted a tweet in which @UkDrillas indicated that the attack involved “testing some new IOT devices,” suggesting that the attack was carried out not by people or bots sending data requests from regular computers, but rather by a network of internet-enabled household appliances or “Internet of Things (IoT)” devices, such as “smart” refrigerators.

Well, it could be worse: Wait till China takes over the "internet of things".

The Huawei 5G (fifth generation) mobile broadband and cellphone system worries Washington. 5G is more than voice and video. This powerful system connects the "internet of things," "things" that could open your garage door or open a dam's floodgates. What if a terrorist or a saboteur were to open the floodgates? If the saboteur were a Chinese agent, would this be an act of war? As it is, hackers have successfully penetrated some of Huawei's broadband gateway systems. -----------------

Swine flu has hit the Philippines and is blamed on feeding pigs leftover food from restaurants etc.

Despite confirmation of the infections, Philippine authorities are in control of the problem and will further tighten quarantine checks, including in airports and seaports, and crack down on smuggling of imported meat to prevent large-scale outbreaks, officials said. They assured that pork supply and prices will remain normal.

italics mine. So someone is trying to export "double dead" meat from the infected pigs to the Philippines because they figure a little bribe will let them make money off of the bad meat instead of destroying the carcasses.

The disease has caused China to cull half their pigs, and VietNam is also affected.

this is why China just dropped their tariffs against American pork and soybeans.

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it's not just Americans

an update on the Francis vs believers controversy.

Family news

Auntie Emie died last night.

She has been on dialysis here for a year, but for the last 2 months has had one infection after another, and was hospitalized several times. She was at home for the last few weeks, taken care of by her niece and a part time nurse during the day, but last night she took a turn for the worse and died in the hospital, with relatives there.

Sigh.

Funerals here in the provinces mean that the body is laid out in the home and the family and friends keep watch 24 hours a day.

Much of our family is overseas: mainly in Chicago or the UK...they are nurses, doctors, or in computer tech/design etc. so the funeral mass will be after they arrive.

The family supplies food: Snacks for the visitors, and meals for those staying to keep watch. So I gave money for food to our cook who will help with the cooking there.

#MeToo in the military

a USA Today article in May noted:

Based on the survey for 2018:

• Sexual assault rate for women was at the highest level, 6%, since 2006. The rate ranged from 4% in the Air Force to 11% in the Marine Corps.
• The odds of a woman experiencing a sexual assault were highest for the youngest women – from 17 to 20 years old. Those odds were 1 in 8.
• In 96% of the cases the alleged offender was a man. The offender most often was one person (64%), a military member (89%) and a friend or acquaintance (62%).
• Nearly 1 in 4 of all women experienced an “unhealthy climate” because of sexual harassment, which was up in the survey. About 16% of all women faced an "unhealthy climate" because of gender discrimination, also up. 

so there is a #MeToo problem for women in the military.
Is this being made worse by the integration of women into a unisex military? Or it is because the Victorian ideas that men must respect women are gone with the wind, thanks to the sexual revolution?

I don't know.

However, it's not just women.

A few days ago, the NYTimes had a report about men who were sexually assaulted.

SEXUAL ASSAULT IN THE MILITARY is a problem widely recognized but poorly understood. Elected officials and Pentagon leaders have tended to focus on the thousands of women who have been preyed upon while in uniform. But over the years, more of the victims have been men.

On average, about 10,000 men are sexually assaulted in the American military each year, according to Pentagon statistics. Overwhelmingly, the victims are young and low-ranking.

Many struggle afterward, are kicked out of the military and have trouble finding their footing in civilian life. For decades, the fallout from the vast majority of male sexual assaults in uniform was silence: Silence of victims too humiliated to report the crime, silence of authorities unequipped to pursue it, silence of commands that believed no problem existed, and silence of families too ashamed to protest.

You tube now censoring history

I sometimes post the short videos posted by the History guy. Usually they are about little known episodes in history, and quite informative without political connotations.

Well, duh, today he writes:

In what can only be called the worst decision in the history of decisions, the censors at Google have deemed a tribute to firefighters on 9/11 to be "too controversial" to monetize. If you think this decision is as egregious as I do, and realize how difficult Google makes it to register a complaint, please address your email to Mr Sundai Patchi, the CEO of Google

here is the censored video:

Movie of the week

murder on the orient express.

I believe this is the BBC version, not the recent film.

Quick before the copyright cops find it's there.

Headlines below the fold

Typhoon related thunderstorms left 400 thousand without power in Chiba district of Japan. Tokyo was also hit by flooding. Nope. American papers didn't notice.

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American Catholic priests and some in the Catholic blogosphere protests Pope's bigotry. Those quoted are not the crazy "Trad-Alt/R" types, but never mind. And it's not the politics but the dogmatic attacks by some in the Vatican that they are protesting: Can you say "Dubia", children?

and the question about an illegal conspiracy that put Pope Francis into power is gaining traction: if there was such a conspiracy, this would make him an anti pope.

Never mind: The church went thru this type of illegal election in the past, and the results weren't pretty, but the church itself survived.

update: The theological errors of the proposed Amazon summit.

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There is a court case about privacy in California, about an under cover reporter who taped Planned parenthood employees admitting they (illegally) sold body parts.

Now the court case suing him for invading their privacy has revealed that they had live post abortion babies who they left die. California judge just denied state's AG from stopping news coverage. But never mind. The press isn't covering it anyway, even though this case would threaten ALL undercover reporters a la "60 minutes" who do this type of thing all the time.

Well, if it got publicity, it might reveal that Kamela Harris was the one behind the decision to prosecute the reporter, and hey, can't criticize a Democratic candidate for president, can we?

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Wretched tweets that Tom Clancy predicted the 911 attack in 1994, (and worried that Clancy had also predicted eco terrorism attack in another book).

but Filipinos know that the Philippine police had uncovered the plot years earlier, but their warnings weren't taken seriously by the CIA, even though the bombing of PhilAirline flight 434 was a test run.

what saved the passengers on that plane was two things: The bomber placed the bomb over where he thought the fuel tank was, but the plane was a modified version, so the fuel tank didn't explode. And it was able to land in Okinawa thanks to the skills of the pilot, Captain Eduardo "Ed" Reyes (no relation) despite some of the control cables being cut, by using the throttle to control the plane.

and of course the US MSM ignores the many terrorist attacks here
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Instapundit has lots of 911 links today, including about the press spinning the terrorism behind the attack, but they missed one: That on 911, the NYTimes published an interview with Bill Ayers who bragged about when he tried to bomb the Pentagon... No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen

and guess who began his Presidential campaign in Ayers living room?

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HongKong protesters using the App Telegram to coordinate the protests, but it isn't secure: The company is changing the app to make sure China can't hack into the network.

why not use facebook or twitter? NPR reports: they are infiltrated with paid propaganda by the Chinese gov't to manipulate public opinion.

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Beauty of nature song of the day

Some remember

Kong Tsung-gan / 江松澗@KongTsungGan

#HK protesters are calling for a suspension of protest today in memory of the September 11 attacks in the US. If we are quiet, you will know why. #StandWithUS #NeverForget911

#HKStandWithUS

headsup from Dar ul Harb's comment on Instapundit, who adds:

Smart tactically, as well. The Chinese state-run media have reportedly been accusing the #HKProtesters of planning terrorist attacks to coincide with 9/11. If they are silent, they've seized the moral high ground.

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related item: AustinBay on China's spy war on the USA.