headlines? nope. the backstory is more important

 latest StrategyPage discussion has a lot about China.

.....

and their essay on the Philippines has a lot about the Chinese aggression stealing the Philippine resources in the West Philippine Sea.

Joys father is dying

 alas still in ICU so the family can't be with him.

Prayers up.

he had a long a loving life.

We took him off the respirator yesterday because he was in a deep coma and after a couple of days the cerebral edema was going down and he was able to breathe on his own.

But now his vital signs are going down, and we are hoping he will pass peacefully.

The bad news: He was in ICU and one reason I advised removing the respirator was so we could move him to a private room and he could die with the family present, but covid restrictions mean fewer rooms since all the rooms were made private, so there are no rooms available.

 In ICU, only one person who had been vaccinated and passed the expensive swab test, is allowed to be with him. So we had a friend who is a caregiver stay with him.

So family still can't be with him.

Medical note: If you leave people on respirators, they still die, but if they are on them too long, it becomes impossible to take them off due to muscle wasting. And keeping a comatose dying patient on an artificial machine is not required by Catholic ethics:

Catholic ethics require ordinary treatment, including food and water, but not extraordinary treatment, which in this case would be a respirator.

Sigh.

This, by the way, was one reason Lolo refused to go to the hospital when he was dying of leukemia: We are physicians, and know that IVs, respirators, CPR etc would only prolong dying in his case.

===============

update: Joy's father died shortly after I posted this.

they will hold the wake at his farm in Bulacan: the tradition is 3 days of visiting for family. With Covid, if they hold it in a funeral home, it will limit visitors but at the farm it will be outside and so distancing can be observed for more people.

Because the family lot is in the Visayas, they will cremate him and place the ashes in a local church mortuary.

This weekend is All Saints day, or Undos, when everyone visits the graves of their loved ones. Usually you go back to your village, clean the gravesite, place flowers and candles, and then visit with family for a few hours. 

Before covid, this meant almost a party atmosphere, where the vendors travel around with food and water (and toys for the bored kids) but now with covid, our local cemetary is closed from today through

next Tuesday.

I Bought cut flowers and candles and sent the maid to clean up Lolo's grave on Tuesday, but did not go myself: it's hot and rainy and makes my asthma worse to be outside.

Dune: Beautiful but...

Dune is the newest hit movie being released, and I suspect it will win oodles of awards.

The previews suggest a fight for freedom and ecology, with lots of excitement. But there is more action in the preview than in most of the movie, which concentrates on slow but beautiful scenery instead of less trendy things like story line, action scenes or character development. 

Like the classic film 2001, it seems to be a half hour plot stretched out by scenery.

Dune follows Paul Atreides and his family as they relocate from their home world to the desert planet, Arrakis, nicknamed Dune, the only source in the universe of the mysterious but vital spice, melange. Amongst this nest of secrecy and subterfuge, Paul becomes involved in a political plot with universal consequences. In the midst of a grand betrayal, he is forced into the desert to live with the secretive Fremen. It's there that he begins to uncover the true nature of the enigmatic spice and starts to realize his full potential.

So it is about the prince growing up. But since he is forced into the desert only at the end of this film, presumably we won't see that until part two.

So the main character in Dune is a prince, and he has a nice mom and later you find one of the soldiers is his dad, also a prince, and he has a weird grandmom. I think. I'm not sure. Presumably the scriptwriters think you have read the book, not thrown it away in frustration because it too is a long overboring classic.

The prince and his family were sent to the Spice planet to take it over but in reality it is because the empire wants to kill  the prince, not by slipping him some arsenic or sending in an assassin, or having his ship explode in space, but by a multi million dollar plot to land him on the spice planet where they could do it and blame someone else.

And this is where it become confusion. The soldier I thought was the body guard was his father the Prince, who apparently isn't as important as his son. Not sure why. And his mom is a nice lady, but I was confused why she was there with him. And what was that part about the crazy grandmom? 

Unlike the prince, they seemed to have normal human emotions: the father did show concern and dignity under his stiff upper lip ethos, while his mom showed she could grovel. 

But the prince has a flat affect, and even when he is emoting, it looks like the character is acting a part, not really feeling the emotion.

So yes, there was some acting in the film. And I wish that we could have been shown a bit of their backstory, to put the story into context (the backstory was told in a sentence or two that were mumbled and could easily be missed)

There is a subplot about ecology, and of course, the reason the book was a hit in the 1960s was that it extolled Spice, a hallucinogenic substance that not only gave you visions, but let you navigate safely through the universe. (shades of Silicaon Valley using hallucinogens and mini doses of LSD to get more creativity).

My stepson said it reminded him of Mandalorian. Which it does because of the desert scenery and the CGI space ships.

Yes, but you cared about Mandi, who has a backstory and shows more emotion wearing a mask than the prince shows in his handsome face for the whole movie.

You care about Mando because he has human connections: he cares about baby Yoda. And the other characters are different, colorful, and act human (even the robots) and you get an idea of their history and why they do what they do.

Not so here.

 So yes, go to see the film, which will probably win oodles of awards.

But if you want to laugh and cry watching a film about people you learn to care about, go rent a copy of the Mandelorian, or the original Starwars films.

Family News

Bad news for now: Joy's father is in a coma, and they took him to the hospital. He is in his 80s and has high blood pressure so I suspect it is a stroke. 

Up to now, he still goes out to the fields to supervise the rice and veggies grown on their small farm.

So she left early this morning to go there (she is the eldest in the family so is essentially the head of the family). Keep them all in your prayers.

To make things worse, he mom has Parkinson's disease and needs a lot of care. They do have a part time caregiver during the day so that the family there can work.

Keep them in your prayers.

 My news:  last week, we finished the paperwork to get my retirement visa approved. Lots of slowness getting the proper forms sent to us, and then we had to go to the bank to pay the fee (thanks to Covid we don't have to go to the Manila office like we did in the past).

The payment is in American dollars, or in pesos, but the exchange rate has been fluctuating and they advised us to pay in dollars.

So we got dollars out of my dollar account at our usual bank, and then went to the bank that handles the government papers, and paid in dollars... no problem...?

but the fee was five dollars US. And our lowest bill was a 20 dollar bill.

The bank said, no we won't give you change so you can pay the fee, so Joy went to other nearby banks to try to get it (long lines due to covid) but they said no also. Finally Joy found a private money changer who had a five dollar bill but not 20 dollars in change, but she said please so he gave her what he had and she will get the rest late.

So that is done and hopefully I am ok for another year.

Kuya is busy with the rice harvest: the typhoon missed us but there has been a lot of rain, and this caused a delay in harvesting.  

We do have our own thresher and in the past harvested by hand and then threshed the rice for our fields and for our contract farmers, but now we rent the machine to harvest and thresh (separate the grain from the stem). And we had to wait our turn to use it. And then there was a delay because it got stuck in the mud for awhile.

I don't have a video of our harvest, but this one is from nearby Pampanga and gives you an idea of how it works:

Sigh

 For Green types who see the wonderfulness of back to nature, maybe they might want to go out into the fields and spend a day bent over cutting rice by hand, and then budling it up by hand and then putting it on a cart pulled by a waterbuffalo, the taken to thresh by hand too.

Then it needs to be dried before storing so that it doesn't get bugs or mold. We had bought a rice drier but it burnt out and so now we either pay a rice merchant to dry it for us, or we dry it the old fashioned way in the sun.

During harvest season, that means either on a tarp, or on a road or parking lot. 

The sun will dry it, but you have to move it around to dry properly, and you have to remove it if it threatens to rain. And if it is too rainy, it means poor quality rice. After one bad typhoon, a couple years ago, we "lost" most of our harvest when our drier broke and we had to wait too long to get it dried. We did save much of the rice, but since we sell gourmet brown rice, the quality was too poor for us to use it, so we had to sell for a lower price to be used mainly for feeding animals.

In other news, Kuya's daughter is in college in the US and even though she had her shots, got some kind of a virus and is now having brain fog. Or maybe it is from the stress of college (she's third year).

She is planning to go to Hawaii for student teaching in January.

What is it about Hawaii and student teaching? Because my niece is there now doing her student teaching rotation, but will come back home in December.

Ruby told me it is to have the students learn about multiculturalism but hey, her college is in Minnesota, which has a large Native America, Hmong, and Somali population in the Twin Cities.

But Hawaii, unlike Minnesota, is considered safer for student teachers, although they do have a teacher shortage, probably because of the isolation.

Eurocentic pronoun day

So the US State Dept is pushing International pronoun day.

How white of them! (/s)

You see, male/female/neutral nouns and pronouns are mainly used in indo European  languages, and may or may not correspond to gender. The German word for girl, for example, is neutral. And objects that in English would require a neutral pronoun or ending, in other IndoEuropean languages use gender designations.

One example, in English, was the traditionally a ship was considered female, so in the past you would say: She sank, not it sank.

So in many IndoEuropean languages, if the noun is masculine or feminine, you have to use the proper pronoun.

Here is an example in a French language video:

But what about non IndoEuropean languages?

I'll use examples of languages that I have studied.

In Chikaranga, a Bantu dialect, there are numerous noun classifications but none are based on biological gender.

This video is about Swahili, which is a similar language.

Similarly, Tagalog, a Philippine language, has one pronoun for everyone: male, female, bacla or tomboy.

which is why sometimes a Filipino will say he when talking about a female, or vice versa: a common mistake, as this teacher points out.

So pushing pronouns here is a sign of both White privilege (acting as if all languages should follow the example of English) and cultural imperialism, because the pronoun wars is a proxy for the US pressuring the rest of the world to affirm the sexual confusion of the woke community as normal.

Essentially this is cultural imperialism: because most culturally conservative cultures  see the male/female division as one of the bricks that support the idea that families are important.

So does this exclude those who don't fit in to the sexual bianary? Well, here in the Philippines they are just part of the extended family...that is just the way they are, so no problem.

whereas, in the USA, the Calvinistic heritage encourages a judgemental attitude: it ostracizes those who don't fit in, so as a result, the most aggressive of the gender wokes, (unlike most gays),  hate both their own gender and the traditional family.

I would use an ordinary preferred pronoun out of politeness, but some of these are made up, and seem to be a sign of vanity than a search for respect. How does an old lady like me remember all those variations that keep popping up?

Old fashioned the respect should solve the problem (wear a name tag).

But respect has to go beyond just pronouns.

I had a correspondence with a US bureaucrat a couple months ago, and he included his preferred pronouns on his letter. No problem (it was him/his). But he kept addressing me by my first name, even after I requested twice that he refrain from doing this.

In American culture, using a first name implies friendliness, but to older people in the USA, and in many more traditional cultures, it implies that the one doing this thinks you are a child, or inferior in status, and even implies that you are incompetent (which is why we aren't supposed to call nursing home patients by their first name).

To someone living in Asia, it is disrespectful for someone I don't know well to use a first name without a title (example, I am  formally called Dr. Reyes, but in less formal meetings I am Dr Nancy or Tita Nancy)..

We docs learn the nuances of speech when we address those from different cultures (for me, I learned these things informally but now they have classes to teach medical students). 

And this goes beyond things like how to address the patient, but to things like eye contact, distance from the patient when you discuss things with them, touching them or not touching them, and things like how to point to something or someone. (example: no, he's not making faces: He's pointing with his lips).

One does wish that the US State Dept, had some cultural anthropologists to explain these nuances to them.

Feynman: science, curiosity and reality

 I put this on a previous post:

but alas I suspect some people have never heard of him.

Feynman was a Nobel prize winner and famous teacher, but most Americans became aware of him when he debunked the NASA coverup of the Challenger disaster: and did it in a way that anyone, including those without a scientific background, could understand what he was talking about: 

...........

This movie is about that story: He was chosen by the team players in the government mainly because he was an iconoclast, and they knew they would not be able to get the true story out.

....

but you know, I first learned about Feynman in this PBS program, about Tuva: a small Siberian country best know for it's throat singing.

....

Slavery, racism and All the bad news that is fit to print (and no, it isn't Biden's fault)

 I checked the headlines, and it's bad of course.

Biden opened the border, so voila, a lot of folks decided they should migrate into the USA before someone recognizes that these folks just want to have an opportunity for a better life, which they can't get in their home countries, but will be taking jobs from Americans, because hey, companies know they will work for lower wagers.

The reason they are leaving is that no one will set up companies in their countries because of corruption. But, hey, the Pope is so busy blaming global warming and wanting impose The Great Reset he can't be bothered about preaching things like "thou shalt not steal".

I laugh when one of the proposed solutions is to send money to poor countries suffering poverty from "climate change". The dirty little secret it that most of this money will be stolen and go into the pockets of rich politicians, and the poor will not benefit. 

And corruption is why so many Latin American and Haitians seek to migrate to the USA.

 Michael Yon reports the details: many moved to other south American countries but now see an opportunity to migrate to the USA where opportunities are better... but ironically not a lot of Venezuelans, even though there are huge numbers of these folks in Colombia. (Before Covid, Colombia had cleaned up their act and was becoming prosperous. Now they might relapse into chaos, alas...).

But hey, a couple million illegal Haitians or Central Americans will probably settle with friends and relatives already in the USA, and like my relatives, will integrate and become proud citizens. 

But the really dangerous problem is China, who is licking their chops at the thought of invading Taiwan.

But Taiwan is not the only one they are bullying

China and India at war? 

...to listen to later. -

 Taiwan is near to Luzon, and taking over Taiwan will not only let them own the microchip industry but block a major internet cable and major shipping lanes thru the West Philippine sea.

But never mind: 

LOOOK RACISM.

Repent, they say, but actually they mean to censor history, destroy religion, and control your ability to think: because to erase the past means you can control the future.

Heh

The elite neurotic well educated but clueless white Karens who run the US social media are now concentrated on Slavery, meaning everything is racist, even when it isn't. 

I spied a new series on some network about the history of slavery, as in western slavery, which appears to be propaganda to make you feel guilty and repent your sins. Even if your ancestors were being starved to death or killed in pogroms at the time and had nothing to do with the miniscule slave trade in the southern US (miniscule because most slaves (over 90 percent) in the West African slave trade actually went to the Indies or Latin America).

Their ignorance of history is appalling.

And of course, the African slave trade was not limited to the Americas.

most Americans know the phrase: Dr Livingstone, I presume".

But the background is that Dr. Livingstone went into the interior of Africa and reported on the decimation of East Africa from the Arab slave trade. Smithsonian article here. It mentions Livingstone's answer to the trade: Economic development so that the locals didn't have to enslave their neighbors to make a living.

Kidnapping people for slavery or making money out of selling them for ransom still is going on today. Ditto for kidnapping school kids to groom them into becoming killer child soldiers, because children are easier to brainwash.

When I was in Africa, the "militants" would enter schools and kidnap the kids to become soldiers. This is still going on, especially with the radical Islamicists in Nigeria.

Militant groups are often beloved by the rich leftists in Europe and the USA, but not always by the locals.

Indeed, one of the reasons that the Colombian people turned against FARC was not because of the drug lords taking them over (The locals figures if the Yanks were stupid enough to take drugs, hey why not make some money off of them). But the FARC would kidnap people for ransom, force local farmers into working in their drug factories, and sometimes kill priests and pastors who preached against them.

So after mass demonstrations made them decide to make peace, things improved. Ah, but the stupid Pope congratulated their leader for making peace, without of course mentioning his sins and murders should be repented, or suggesting that maybe he should give back some of those millions of dollars he extorted from the innocent.

Sigh.

The same thing is going on in parts of Mexico now, but never mind.

There is enough blood in human history that slavery, which was often the alternative to killing POWs, or criminals, or the indigent, was actually a better alternative.

But the American slave trade was bad because it was run by those considering themselves Christian, and unlike many countries, the racial factor made it difficult to escape the stigma.

But the slave trade was not limited to Africa.

the phrase in the Marine Hymn, to the shores of Tripoli, are a reminder of America's first war, against the Barbary pirates. But the North African slave trade went on for a thousand years, and few remember it, although until Vatican II, Catholics had a feast to Mary, our Lady of Ransom, referring to the priests who collected money to ransom folks kidnapped by these groups.

The Islamic slave trade in Eastern Europe was extensive, but not well documented: but the Slavic countries remember, and is one of several reasons (the other being the Mongol and Turkish atrocities) that these countries dislike the European Union's welcome of Islamic "refugees", not because they hate refugees or poor Muslim families seeking a better life, but because in reality many of these refugees are military age men who have no skills and don't want to assimilate. LINK.

History often lauds civilizations but ignores the common folks who suffer. For example, when you read about the Islamic Andelusian paradise in Spain, just remember they lived high off the hog (/s) off the Irish and British and Slavic slaves sold to them by the Vikings or by Barbary pirates.

And what about the Asian slave trades? The Visayas have the remains of forts built by the Spanish to stop the Mindanao Moros from capturing Filipinos for slave. Of course, go back in pre Spanish times, before Christianity and Spain made slavery taboo, and you can read about the Tagalogs kidnapping slaves from the southern Philippines.

Slavery was not the same everywhere: and forced labor includes peasants with few rights, and factory workers who faced starvation if they didn't work long hours. Thanks to unions, things have improved in the west.

But today, millions of people work on contracts in other countries, mainly but not always in the Middle East. This include many Filipino OFWs.  And the Covid crisis made it worse: Because some are now unemployed, or maybe working but not paid. And the quarantines make it hard to travel home.

It is estimated that 700 thousand Filipino OFW have returned home because of the covid epidemic, and unemployment here is high because restaurants and shops are shut down: and as I wrote earlier, even those doing e commerce have to face getting their goods through quarantine that requires an expensive covid test.

Most overseas workers are grateful for the opportunity to support their families back home, but some are forced to work long hours, or pushed into sexual slavery, with little recourse to the law. Migrant Rights Organization has many stories about these problems.

As for China, well, maybe using prisoners to make stuff is not slavery, but again who notices? Not the PC Karens who pretend not to know about blood cobalt, pollution, or that slave labor workers with few rights made their iphones.

------------------

an aside: I read that a few American cities are reporting leptospirosis infections, a disease spread by rats, due to the low hygiene levels of the inner cities.

Well, every time we have a major flood, we have cases of this because people have to wade through dirty water to get around. 

It is easily treated with antibiotics early, but can be fatal.

But, like the outbreak of Hepatitis A in southern California, the cause is that these cities are ignoring basic public health/hygiene lessons of the past.

Dr. Levine call your office. They need a cleanup in Aisle Five  New York City.

Sigh.

when Rules result in deaths: Yup. It's the bureaucratic mindset.

 A relative of ours was in a personal care facility in Pennsylvania when Covid hit and it meant our family couldn't visit her, and we were very worried since she was high risk (obesity and diabetes).

Many nursing home patients had a poor immune system due to cancer, age, obesity, diabetes, renal failure, etc. (which is why many die despite having the vaccine).

But early in the epidemic, isolation was the most important way to stop the spread. So visitors, who are much needed to keep up the morale of the elderly in these homes, were restricted.

So why did so many states push to allow post hospital covid positive patients to be readmitted?

It's complicated but it amounts to thinking that regulations make it safe, even when regulations are not followed.

The rational was that hey, the nursing homes could keep them safely isolated. 

Yup. That's what the regulations and documents stated, but anyone who knows about nursing homes knew that, not only did many lack PPE early in the epidemic (blamed on Trumpieboy but actually because the administrators didn't want to spend money to stock up on these, and took their time in ordering more), but the staff didn't use them properly.

Indeed, the authorities knew that this was a problem: From March 2020:

In the initial wave of surveys during the week of March 30, CMS found that 36 percent of facilities inspected in recent days did not follow proper hand washing guidelines and 25 percent failed to demonstrate proper use of personal protective equipment (PPE). Both of these are longstanding infection control measures that all nursing homes are expected to follow per Federal regulation. 

The background to this is that many of the staff were poorly trained and overworked. 

So why insist that post hospitalization infectious covid patients be placed back into their nursing homes?

The regulation behind this is not new and the idea is to get long term patients out of expensive hospital beds into cheaper nursing home beds.

and the problem didn't start with Covid.

One of our nursing homes in Minnesota back in the late 1990s had an ongoing fight with the authorities who insisted we admit a patient with Vancomycin resistant Staph aureus, meaning that the germ was resistant to all antibiotics. 

Now, this nursing home had many patients with diabetic ulcers who were there mainly because they couldn't travel during the wintertime to get daily treatment. If these wounds were infected with a resistant germ, it could lead to amputation or death. 

But never mind: On paper the patient could be isolated and kept safe.

and that is the real problem: rules vs reality.

or as the scientist who cracked the facade about the Challenger disaster noted:

Regulations matter, but regulations not connected to reality are essentially CYA lies, meant to protect the bureaucrats, not the patients. So why didn't doctors or nurses working for the government point this out? Yes, it's hard to fire a government employee, but they can make your life hell until you quit.

I know: because I worked as a physician for both the state and the federal (IHS) systems and was always in trouble because I put the patient's welfare before the regulations.

But not everyone does this, which is why I suspect Dr. L managed to get her job: I suspect she was a team player. And of course, being a team player, she decided not to object to these dangerous regulations when it came to covid.

The governors could plead ignorance, because hey they are politicians, not doctors.

But what about doctors who go along with the regulations even though they knew it was nonsense? And indeed, their actions proved that they knew the practice was dangerous.

As this Newsweek article from May 2020 pointed out:

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Moved Mother Out Of Nursing Home As Coronavirus Death Toll Increased In State....

Yup. She put your relatives into danger while making sure her own mother was safe in a hotel.

Again from that May 2020 article in Newsweek: 

Outbreaks in Pennsylvania long-term care facilities make up nearly 70 percent of the state's coronavirus-related deaths and 21 percent of the state's positive cases of the virus. In a Wednesday press conference, Levine announced that of the 58,698 confirmed cases statewide, 12,408 cases are among residents of long-term facilities, including nursing homes and personal care homes. Of the total 3,943 deaths in Pennsylvania, 2,705 have occurred in residents in long-term facilities....

In this article from a small town Pennsylvania newspaper in June 2020, she defends the policy:

Levine defends returning nursing home residents to facilities after coronavirus treatment: 'The virus was already there,' she says....

Pennsylvania Department of Health Secretary Rachel Levine on Monday downplayed a point that critics of the state’s coronavirus response in nursing homes and long-term-care facilities regularly make: that returning residents who had been treated in hospitals for the virus to their homes at the facilities helped speed its spread.

She said that the state followed federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services guidelines that if a resident has tested positive for COVID-19 at a facility and then required hospitalization, that when they recovered, they were returned home to their facility.

Italics mine. Has any reporter found out who in the vast Medicare bureaucracy put out that regulation? 

She said the state instituted guidelines provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in early in March when the first cases were detected in Pennsylvania, including limiting outside visitors from entering long-term-care facilities. “They contracted the virus in the facility. So it doesn’t mean they were bringing it to the facility. The virus was already there,” she said Monday during her daily press briefing.

 again italics mine. 

This is an untrue statement, since the possibility of spreading infection goes higher with the increase in the number of people with the infection.

But it does recognize that many people with covid weren't sick enough to be placed in hospitals, so yes, they could spread it within the institutions, who did not have adequate PPE or isolation rooms or staff to handle these cases.

the smart thing would have been to designate one facility to handle these patients in proper isolation in a different facility in order to protect the other patients. In the past, this was done with TB, for example, and I am old enough to remember when Philadelphia had a TB hospital and an infectious disease hospital to isolate cases that needed care.

Putting covid positive post hospital patients in these homes should have been a viable option: but the dirty little secret is that the paperwork and regulations stopped that from becoming reality.

Hey, that would mess up the protocols of insisting they return to their usual nursing home bed.

So place the "Republican pounce" headline here.

However, others see it differently. State Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican from Franklin County, called for Levine’s resignation May 11, saying her actions were a major factor in the large number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the state’s nursing homes. “These failings are compounded by being complicit in the virus spreading through our elder care homes, triggered by unscientific and illogical directives, forcing them to readmit COVID-19 patients,” he said in part, adding, “Let me state this clearly, this order by Secretary Levine is responsible for the deaths of approximately 2,500 of our citizens, and displays the gross incompetence of someone unfit for office. The bottom line is Secretary Levine has failed to protect our most vulnerable population.”

The failure of the CDC and regulatory bodies in the covid epidemic are legion, but hey the press just blamed Trump for the bureaucratic mindset that put following regulations as more important than fixing things.

So why is a physician who obviously put cooperation with regulations as more important than patient's lives being placed as head of the nation's public health service?

Partly because, as someone with a history of being a team player, one doubts she will do the needed firing and reforms needed to make the America public health system do their job.

But as you can see from the ecstatic headlines, the job was given to her, not for her competence (?/S) but because she used to be a man.

And to make things worse, it was nominating an outsider despite the fact that the PHS Commissioned Corps has many many well qualified minority physicians who could do the work, but I guess if you are a trans activist, it doesn't matter if you are white.

 And it is politically correct to push trans rights, even if the nominee has been shown to be willing to let people die in order to be a team player.

I won't put up her photo: The right makes fun of her all the time for her appearance, but my only comment is that she needs a fashion makeover by Vice Ganda.  

Missing link to Squid Game?

 I found Squid game very good, but stopped watching it because it was so nihilistic. One critic said it was "violence porn" and I guess that is as good a description as any.

Would people actually enter a game where the chances of being killed are much much higher than getting rich? And what is the motive for those running the game? 

But now there are rumors that the subplot explains it all: Someone is harvesting the organs of the dead contestants, and many note that this resembles the organ lottery in China, where prisoners organs are taken to match the one who needs it and will pay good money for it.

ah, but never mind. PBS insists China has said it is no longer doing this, and hey, we know China never lies, right?

It is an open secret that China harvests of organs from prisoners, including political prisoners whose only crime is that they follow the wrong religion (the FalunGong, and now the Uighar Muslims).

Dean Koontz book Your Heart Belongs to Me, had this as the subplot.

Here in tne Philippines, there is an illegal organ donation scam that goes on all the time, but not by killing folk, just enticing the poor to give away an organ they don't need for money that they do need (and of course the middleman makes most of the profit).

and I won't even go into the abortion baby parts scams in the USA: it says a lot that the ones who exposed this illegal scam were sued for privacy invasion.

But the baby parts scandal is one reason that pious catholics are against some of the covid vaccines.

and of course, surrogate motherhood is another way to exploit poor women. Something to remember the next time you read about people adopting babies, not from moms who cannot afford to care for an unexpected pregnancy, but designer babies with the proper genes paid for by the rich who are too old or too gay to bother to actually give a home to children who actually need families to care for them.

Most unwanted babies are aborted because abortion is easy and the social system, including parents, pressure the mom. But you know a lot of these babies are born and cared for thanks to the grandparents who are willing to care for both mom and the child. (Most adoptions of older kids are done by family or friends, often outside the social welfare system.)

Right now, the PP types are pushing the meme: I had to have an abortion as a teenager so I could go to college so it saved my life. 

Except that the moms of both President Obama and President Clinton, when faced with an unplanned pregnancy as teenagers, chose to have their babies because their parents helped them, and indeed, both moms went to finish college/nursing school.

But hey, babies are easy to place with parents. 

But other kids are removed from mom because their mom is too young, too poor, or just too drug addled to care for them, and there aren't family members to take them in and they do need homes.

Forget the gobblygook: it's the duties of our daily lives

Philipine cultures is family oriented, so God is part of the family: Father God, Kuya Jesus and Mama Mary. The Black Nazarene procession is a way to identify our suffering with that of Christ, and El Nino is a way to see the importance of children.

 Well, anyway, Father Bing (!) puts things into perpective for ordinary folks who just want to serve God in their ordinary lives.

This idea is old of course: But reintroduced into the church by a saint called the Little Flower, who saw doing ordinary things of duty with love was the best way to serve God.

Or as the Hindu saint told a woman who came to him saying she no longer could do rituals because she no longer believed in God, was asked who she loved, and she said her husband and family. So he told her: So for you God is your husband, God is your family.

Those of us who learned about the faith pre Vatican II knew this: We were put on the world to know love and serve God, and to love our neighbor as ourself.

Hmm...didn't that sardonic Jewish carpenter say that once?

Well, anyway, here is old fashioned Catholicism without the gobbly gook.

.....

Kirk in Space

...LINK... 

and just ignore the Freudian implications behind the design of the rocket and the amourous Kirk.

Kirk, in StarTrek, is a character similar to Ulysses: who when given the choice between two bad alternatives, finds a third and wins in the end.

one is reminded of Tennysons's poem Ulysses:

       ...There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods....

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

Although Wm Shatner is the first Trekkie to go into space, James Doohan, aka Scottie, had his ashes taken into space a couple years ago. 

------------

The impulse to seek newer lands out of curiosity, or because you want to find a newer better home for your family, or out of the desire to find wealth or to trade has a long history.

I am listening to this book via Scribd: and he notes the ten thousand years of traders

Something to remember when you read all the cancel culture against Columbus: 

One is not celebrating the fact that he was an SOB who was actually arrested by the Spanish government for some of his deeds, but because, after his voyage, he inspired others.

And this resulted in many changes, of peoples, of ideas, of plants and of animals, and of course of diseases. So the result was both good and bad: 

The Columbian exchange.

Historical evidence proves that there were interactions between Europe and the Americas before Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492. But Columbus’s contact precipitated a large, impactful, and lastingly significant transfer of animals, crops, people groups, cultural ideas, and microorganisms between the two worlds. In 1493, for example, on his second voyage, Columbus brought horses, dogs, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats to the “new” world. Later in the 1530s, the Spanish conquistador and explorer Francisco Pizarro saw the potato in the Andes of South America and brought this crop to Europe. Bacteria and viruses, as well technological and cultural ideas, moved between the hemispheres, and Europeans forcibly transported enslaved people from Africa to the Americas to provide free labor. These transfers had a monumental impact on the development of our modern world.

---------------------------

UPDATE:

 

Lecture series of the month

 

Debunking the debunkers

 So what about Ivermectin, a horse medicine medicine widely used in humans for river blindness and fileriasis: does it also work for Covid?

Not according to the BBC.

ah but who analyzes the science of that article published by an esteemed news source?

Dr. C, who is a nurse educator PhD does it for you.

And his analysis reminds me of how we docs would do "journal clubs" where we would read an article and analyze the data and statistics.

LOL.

After noting the problems with the BBC article, he does cite an actual metanalysis of studies....fast forward to 20 minutes for a more scientific analysis of ivermectin studies. 

PDF from May that analyzes studies.

LINK to analysis of 64 studies.

 I am like Dr.C: I am pro vaccine, pro mask, pro keeping one's distance, and now that we are able to buy human ivermectin, pro ivermectin. 

 IF I lived in Florida, I'd be pro monoclonal antibodies, and if I lived in the US I would probably be pro the newer and more expensive medicine (although I haven't read the studies on them yet, since they aren't available here). 

Our DOH has pooh poohed the use of Ivermectin, noting they plan to do a double blind study, but then people started using it anyway, either the animal version or the pills sold in the market that might or might not be the real thing. 

So Duterte said, hey if their doctor prescribes it, let them use it. So now we can buy it at the pharmacy by prescription (or from an online pharmacy, as we do, with a doctor's prescription).

but we are middle class. Are the farmers and poor people able to get hold of it and use it correctly? I don't know.

my point is that we are a poor country and most people have not had the vaccine, although the country is busy giving it out we started a bit late in giving out vaccines due to red tape. Indeed, this is one reason that Duterte's popularity (and Biden's popularity, and the popularity of every other leader of any other country ) has gone down in recent months.

but there is some good news: although we had another outbreak due to the Delta variant, the number of cases are now going down.

---------------------

in other news: the latest typhoon was north of here, but we did have heavy rain. (Signal one)... Not a lot of wind, so hopefully the rice harvest will not be destroyed.

K drama to the rescue

 

 Right now, the K drama on Netflix that is a hit is Squid Game.

Very good drama, but too unrealistic for me: and a copy cat of a mixture of Hunger Games (without the altruism or the sympathetic characters that made that franchise so popular), and the Naked Prey (or the many other films about rich folks bored hunting animals and so they hunt humans).

Better to watch Vincenzo, which is a Korean mafia guy going against local businessmen thugs and corruption...

includes humor, and plot twists you don't see coming, like where Vincenzo stops the bad guys from wrecking the building late at night by throwing a party.

,,,,

But what if you don't have Netflix?

Well, our cable tv system has various channels that are constantly changing, and we just got KBS there so we can watch K dramas etc.

This one is being shown now:

... 

 it's a bit slow in the beginning, and has a lot of different characters to follow in it's 120 episodes. An elderly father who resents his sons remarries a widow, and the families clash and then heal. Hmm... reminds me of Lolo...

 KBS is also posting some of their older dramas on youtube. 

whereas the usual hallmark type drama is about a single upper middle class attractive female finding her old boy friend and settling down, but family, children, illness etc are now where to be found, these long K dramas are more like the old fashioned afternoon soap operas, with lots of different families from different levels of society, but with plots of family ties.

 Once again is about divorces and remarriage after the characters mature and learn to reconcile:

  ......

 and Beautiful Love Wonderful Life about bullying, teen age suicide, and how lies can distort one's life but the truth sets you free.

then there are the wonderful costume dramas.

....

or samidang which mixes past and future and fantasy with a modern art history professor who has soul links with the mother of a neo confuscian scholar and an artist in her own right in the past.

...

or this rewrite of the history of Korea when the debate was if they should open to the outside world.

so there are things to watch when you get tired of endless hallmark romances (g rated romances with no one working very hard and no families involved) or superheroes or serial killer plots.

Sigh.

-----------------------

update: HERE is an article that explains the social and economic background of Squid Game.

follow the money

The CIA destablized the Ukraine helped by an American businessman who funded propaganda of the so called opposition.

The result wax to replace a pro russian president with an antirussian president who was corrupt. Both Oliver Stone and other left wing sites discuss this, and of course, Alex Jones has had several programs about the back story of Hunter Biden's scandal

So a couple years later, that same American businessman funded a reporter from CNN to start an anti Duterte news site. 

Full story here by a writer who used to work at Rappler (2015 story) 

Philippine online news site Rappler announced today it raised an undisclosed amount from Omidyar Network, a fund created by eBay founder and entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam. The fund invests in “entrepreneurs who share our commitment to advancing social good at the pace and scale the world needs today.”....The funding follows an investment made by North Base Media (NBM) in Rappler last May. NBM is a fund for independent journalism founded by three prominent journalists: Marcus Brauchli, who headed the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post newsrooms; Sasa Vucinic, founder and former head of the Soros-backed Media Development Investment Fund; and Stuart Karle, former Reuters COO.

then you have this report about who is this guy:

Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal write about eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, in “How One of America’s Premier Data Monarchs is Funding a Global Information War and Shaping the Media Landscape”. 

 With offices in Washington, Silicon Valley, and six foreign countries, the Omidyar Network propagates the neoliberal ideology of its billionaire namesake through “impact investing” and a “property rights” initiative. Outside the U.S., the Omidyar Network funds an array of foreign media outlets, like Ukraine’s Hromadske and the Philippines-based Rappler, that have participated in pro-Western information warfare-style campaigns against rogue governments... 

This February 12, Rappler editor-in-chief Maria Ressa was arrested as well, accused of “cyber-libel” by the Filipino government for a 2012 article. 

The Omidyar Network and the Omidyar-funded Committee to Protect Journalists have set up a $500,000 legal defense fund for Ressa. It’s no wonder then that Ressa is able to continue with Rappler‘s operations despite its inability to turn a profit and is now expanding in the digital realm through livestreaming.

The Rappler news site is in English, so the elites and overseas readers could be influenced to hate Duterte, whose main sin is to hate the CiA for some of their shenanigans in Davao and try to make nice with China, who is on our doorstep thanks to PNoy and Obama not stopping their aggression in the west Philippine sea.

nor was this the only anti Duterte news site funded by CIA fronts, as this Manila Times article notes.

Source: USAid website. NED (National Endowment for Democracy) itself in its arrogance, however, doesn’t even bother about such legalities, and said in its report that the money given to the “institute” is to set up a media enterprise: “To provide the public with a credible source of independent news reporting. The organization will publish an online daily newspaper that covers critical and under-reported issues in the southern region of the country, including the peace process, governance, business, and the environment. The publication will feature articles and reports that examine in more depth the impacts of local- and national-level policies on communities in the region.” Neither the NED nor the US State Department obviously respects our Constitution. MindaNews is cross-linked to the other news sites funded by the NED: the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Rappler, the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, and Vera Files, which have received $2 million (P100 million) in funds since 2016, or when Duterte assumed power. This means that each of these anti-Duterte US-funded media entities routinely post on their websites the reports of the other websites. This has the effect of increasing the readership of their websites and putting their articles high in google and yahoo’s search results. poster The US-government’s funding of MindaNews is a very bad precedent that threatens our sovereignty. Any foreign government or a mammoth media enterprise can simply go into Philippine internet media by coursing its money through a “fake institute.” What would be next? A US-government funded VisayasNews and LuzonNews? Will our people’s opinions be molded by the US state?

Duterte entered the election late, and as the late Marian Santiago quipped, the choice was between the CIA candidate and the Communist one. The CIA candidate was an American citizen who lived in the WashingtonDC area for years and returned ten years before the election and reclaimed her citizenship...meaning she barely was eligible to run for office. There were of course other candidates, most of whom were well known politicians.

Duterte however as a populist tried to make nice with the NPA and Islamic rebels in Davao so was not reliable, so the CIA opposed him.

Back to Rappler and the nobel prize.

The international news laments the government was out to shut her down but it was more complicated.

Filippinos are very proud and oppose outsiders telling them what to do.

So when an American businessman suspected of being a CIA front gave the reporter money for her news site, the government objected. The story then changed to 'it was a gift to her, not to the website", at which point the government asked so why didn't you pay taxes.

So is this persecution? Only if you realize that the VIPS would have gotten away with it.

so poor lady will paint herself a martyr.

Finally, the background of this is that the Philippines was being groomed to be a narco state. We have millions of folks coming to and fro because they work or live overseas but visit home all the time. Many are not rich, and vulnerable to bribery to carry drugs.

So drug cartels saw this as a way to distribute drugs.

Duterte has been charged with ten thousand deaths, but what happened was that it was never said out loud but implied that if you wanted to kill your enemy, you could probably get away with it (as the rich get away with it all the time)..So a lot of the deaths were rogue cops killing criminals, some of the deaths were personal payback by people who could not get justice in the courts, and some of the deaths were drug dealers killing each other.

The dirty little secret is that Duterte's drug war was popular, since the average person who doesn't live in the elite gated communities were now safer.

We had four neighbors killed in home invasion robberies in the last couple of years, and they aren't counted. Nor are the political hits by the ex mayor's clan against our present mayor counted, even though these hits killed his brother and bystanders both times (including our nephew).

So cry me a river about giving a nobel peace prize to someone who was funded by outside interests to destroy Duterte because of his attempt to clean up the Philippines.

Like the BLM in the USA, they love civil rights for thugs but don't see the innocent people killed by thugs as a problem.

Musical lnterlude of the week

 

the world is crazy, no?

 I had assumed the US vaccines had been made with cell lines that dated before 2000's when Bush stopped taxpayer money to be used for new cell lines that killed fetuses. This meant that although the cells were morally problematic, until there was an alternative, the Vatican said that the cell lines were so distant from the abortion (over ten years or even over 30 years before) that the vaccine could be used until there was alternative.

And since the bishops as usual didn't make a fuss to pressure the companies, well after all, apparently it was cheaper to just buy baby body parts than figure out how to make adult stem cell lines to make vaccines.

(Ironically it was a Japanese Buddhist scientist who got moral qualms about his research and invented a way to make adult stem cells work)

But now, a PJMedia story on leaked emails that admit new babykilling done to get cell lines to make their newfangled vaccine. It seems they are only using the old cell lines, but the coverup suggests there is more to it.

Hmmm... 

So apparently the crazy Catholics who don't want the Pfizer vaccine are right in having a moral objection.

Someone tell the Pope. 

I got the Astrazeneca, and have no idea how it is made. 

But you know, in our local Philippine newspaper, there was an editorial by a pro chinese writer that pointed out that the western vaccines were made possible by abortion, but that the (weak) Sinovax was not. Of course, the Chinese lie all the time, so who knows, but when rigid catholics object to "Vaccines" I point this out: That there are several vaccines made in several different ways by several different countries, so stop lumping them all together.

But like the masks etc this is a social contagion, a reaction against the craziness of the elites.

Only Dr Rand Paul dares to whisper: Post infection immunity should count.

I myself am worried, not about the deaths, because there just aren't that many (30 thousand deaths over a year in the Philippines out of over a million cases, and probably more since most folks don't get a test).

I am however worried about economic collapse, hunger in poor people as higher petrol and higher fertilizer prices make the price of food go up, and the increase in unemployment and poverty, especially in those who were just getting out of poverty.

That is how revolutions start.

and the rumbles out of China are not comforting: so will they start a little war against Taiwan to distract their people from the economic slump?

Sigh.

Finally, the latest enemy is parents objecting to decisions of the school boards.

When I worked in Apalachia, the school board decided to cut the school budget by firing the art teacher who had been in the primary school for 30 years. We had a community meeting, held in a room that held 100 but had at least 200 inside and some people ouside. 

Hard working coal miners got up and testified how they wanted to keep the teacher, and how she had inspired them. To no avail. 

and the local newspaper, also run by the elites, had a snotty article saying only a few people showed up to object to laying off the teacher. Which meant they didn't send a reporter but did a phone interview with the elite school board. 

Sigh.

It really wasn't my fight since I had my kids in church schools, but when I read that now the Biden adminstration wants to consider those objecting to teaching racism and hatred of America in public schools are now going to be seen as terrorists, then I wonder WTF is going on.

I lived outside the US during the Reagan and Carter administrations, so know that the news may have little or nothing to do with the reality of inside the USA, but hey, one does wonder.

Sigh.