Things that make you go HUH?

Much of this post is sarcasm, so don't take me seriously.

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 Sun Tsu said: “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics…” and Napoleon noted that an army travels on it's stomach, but apparantly Putin figured they'd be greeted with open arms and not need little things to conquer the Ukraine.

StratagyPage  discusses the problem with logistics and supplies, and discusses communications problems here and the modern use of Drones to spy on stuff.

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space: it's not just US vs Russia. It now is US vs Russia vs China vs Elon Musk vs Bezos vs....

SP discusses the ailing Russian Space Program.

more here:

....

Biden is asking for oddles of money for Trumpieboy's Space Force, but at the same time the bureaucrats are putting barriers in the way of launching SpaceX from Florida.

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There is a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth about the Ukraine war, but that's not the only place where there is war, but most wars are low grade insurgencies or wars between tribes in Africa, or hits on civilians when the crazies try to take over.

No, Africa is not monolithic: many areas are modern, and others are living traditional farming lives, but things are changing (cellphones, education, modern medicine, cars and bicycles).

About the only thing one BLM activist said that is actually true is that the MSM in the US rarely reports on this. Of course, I don't see the BLM activists using donations to build clinics in Africa instead of buying real estate, but that's another story for another day.

on the other hand, China is investing a lot in Africa for development. The bad news: I don't see the greens complaining that China's owning mines etc. is a problem because child labor and pollution.

FYI: I've worked in two African countries in the past, and right now my step daughter is doing a short stint in one country there teaching crafts (so women can make things at home and sell them to supplement their income).

personally I think she should take her geeky son with her to hold classes on how to code, but hey that's just me.

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Trudeau cancaled the bank accounts of the truckers, and Biden is cancaling the bank account of Russia.

so who controls the money if they get digital money?

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Cheating is alive and well here. 

179,000 defective ballots found.

The difference is that here they know people try to cheat in elections: in the USA, saying that cheating happens will get you cancaled by Facebook and twitter.

and the US is busy pushing stuff about human rights violations (if you are killed by a druggie or a professional hitman, no problem. If you kill the guy who hired the hitman it will be blamed on Duterte.) How dare he stop the cartels from making the Philippines into a failed state run by the cartels ( like they run Mexico and Venezuela and are trying to get into power to run Colombia).

and now they are hinting that BongBong is the Manchurian candidate.

Heh. Bong bong might dislike the USA, but at least he doesn't need to sign contracts with China like Hunter Biden, because he's already rich with Yamashita's gold.

/s

............

Ah but the big story is the punch at the Oscars over Will Smith's wife alopecia.

So why are all the news stories using the word alopecia to describe her problem? Why not use baldness, hair loss, or other more commonly used words instead of the medical term?

Latest conspiracy theory: Pfizer spent oodles of money sponsoring the Oscars, and they are releasing a new drug to treat alopecia in the near future. So it was all an act.

War, famine and disease, and a volcano for good measure. What else is new?

 the planes have been flying over for a week from a nearby airbase. Yup. the annual Philippine American exercizes are going on.

the joint training often emphasizes humanitarian stuff (e.g. bringing in supplies by the US when a typhoon or other problem hits us, something that happens all the time). But this time, we have had China harassing out fishermen so they are also training for amphibious type stuff.

the usual leftists are saying oy veh this might upset China, but the problem is not that the US will actually do something: The problem is that no one trusts Biden to do anything.

here the US often helps the military with electronic stuff, since it is taboo for outsiders to actually fight against local insurgencies.

Last year, someone (china?) attacked gov't websites here, and of course, the main cable passes south of Taiwan so a major cut in the cable could put us in the dark. Of course, Huawei has their 5G internet here now, (Joy uses it for her teleconferences) background of why this could be a problem LINK.

if war breaks out in Taiwan or China decides to play dirty to punish the Philippines for asserting their legal rights in the West Philippine sea, we could lose our internet.

Or maybe not: From SP: an article discussing communications in the Ukraine war: and how the Russian hackers attacks didn't work because Elon Musk supplied Starlink for their troops.

Sigh.

I know nothing about the Ukraine war because I simply don't trust the propaganda which is manipulating the public to hate conservatives by saying they back Putin. That of course is not true: pointing out provocations to Putin and that Biden's ineptitude might have something to do with the war is a valid criticism, as is the criticism that the elites who want the Great Reset are using this to their advantage. That is not the same as backing a paranoid dictator who for years has expressed the wish to reunite Russia with their lost empire.

 But how will it affect us? Famine... Ukraine's wheat crop has been feeding the Middle East, so now hunger might strike. And with the increase in the cost of fertilizer and diesel, the farmers will have more expenses so the price of wheat will go up.

Lots of reports out there that China is hoarding grain. well, as the saying goes: Been there, done that. China knows if famine strikes, people could revolt.

and these problems will affect the price of rice too: Kuya sighs and says that the increased expense might make him stop growing organic veggies etc. and stick to rice only. And even that might not give us much of a profit. 

Sigh.

China is having other problems: One reason for their (illegal) premature takeover of HongKong was to get money moved from HK Banks to Shanghai, so that they could manipulate the international money stuff (and probably steal stuff). 

But now Shanghai is locked down.

,,,,

So what is going on? Is this covid or is this (as is reported) the Omicron covid, which is not stopped by the weak Chinese vaccine but also is not very lethal.

 Omnicron spread in the air and is more infectious that traditional covid so lockdowns and masks don't help much.. heck, recent studies suggest they didn't help much in the original outbreak either, since the cost of the lockdown outweighed the benefits.

In other words, is this over-reaction, or is something else out there that we are not being told about?

in contrast, the official figures in the Philippines show only 25 deaths and 385 cases of covid here. 

Here Dr. C notes what a lot of leftist types noted for years about news stories and a lot of docs noticed about Medical journals: Before you believe the data, follow the money.

Usually we docs had journal clubs where we discussed and dissected articles to detect problems, but for lay folk who are repeatedly told to "Trust the Science", it will make them actually distrust science instead of distrusting those who interpreted the science wrong...

Sigh.

the main problem here right now is not Covid, but the heat: it's TagInit, the hot season before the monsoon rains come. 

the heat is stressful for the elderly with high blood pressure and/or diabetes, and although there are more aircon now, the poor only have fans to keep them cool....Another neighbor's husband died of a heart attack yesterday and of course in the hot season we also will see children needing IVs for diarrhea dehydration.

 Me, I am in the air conditioned bedroom much of the day and it took me two days to recover from heat exhaustion after the brown out a few days ago... my small generator did keep the air con running a bit, enough to keep the room under 85 degrees but not enough to stop heat exhaustion.

and if threats of war, famine, and disease don't worry you: how about a volcanic eruption?

not near us, so we are safe.

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The election is in full swing. The airways and social media are full of ads for Robrero, meaning the money folk (and probably the CIA linked money folk) are behind her, as are the major news papers.

The elites are going full court press to destroy BBMarcos.

 However, the people tend to vote for who they want. True, sometimes who they want is the one who pays the best for their vote (they're all crooks, so may as well make money), but if the voters want a populist they will vote for the one they want. Which is how Erap and Duterte won over the candidates of the elite oligarchy that runs the country. In other words, don't trust the social media on this one: BongBong Marcos could win.

The streets are noisy with sound trucks advertizing their candidates, and the local election posters are up all over. 

And yes we are open: I still wear a mask outside but it's only required in stores.

and this morning, I heard the music of the local exercize class at dawn. So things are improving.

Death on the Nile: so why did she choose a dork over Russel Brand?

 The new version of Death on the Nile could have been great, but except for Kenneth Branagh and Gal Gadot (who lights up the screen in every scene she plays in), one simple doesn't care about any of the characters in it. 

 

I take that back: Sophie Okonedo has a nice scene, but even Russel Brand sort of morphs into a dork.

And that is the problem: it spends a lot of time making us listen to the lovely Sophie's singing but doesn't deliniate the characters around the murder so that it sort of makes you not care.

and where are all those lovely scenes of Egyptian ruins? And where are the eccentric characters? 

Now, the 1978 film was full of interesting characters, acted by known stars who played it to the hilt. True, it wasn't Agatha Christie, but who cared? It was fun.

 

But the new version doesn't have any bad overacting that made that version fun to watch. Indeed, except for a short scene with Sophie Okonedo it doesn't have much acting at all.

It does explain about Poirot's mustache and why he remains unmarried (to hide severe facial scars from a war injury, and his finace rejected him due to his severe scars).

But the backstories of the characters are quickly mentioned and then passed over, so if you didn't read the book you might be lost.

Actually, since they changed some of the characters, and left others out completely, reading the book wouldn't help. 

 The embezzlement by the accountant is briefly mentioned. and the stolid German doctor was changed into a British doctor as the Lord who loved the dead lady and was planning to marry her, but was turned down when she eloped with Simon (who is nice and a bit nerdy, but not sexy. What did she see in him? Gal, you chose that nerd over Russel Brand? What were you thinking?)

and what is the nonsense about the jewel thief? this part of the plot was changed to a quick theft of the jewels by a young guy who thought he could sell the jewels so he could marry his girlfriend (never mind that the large yellow diamond would be easy to identify and hard to sell without proper contacts)

so why did he steal the necklace? because his mommy refused to approve of his marriage to the daughter of the black singer... uh, honey, did you ever hear of something called a "job" to support yourself instead of living off your mommy's money?

My advice: recut the film and add a little humor, and add some more in depth interviews like Poirot had with Sophie Okonedo so we could actually get to know the characters background and possible motivation to murder the poor little rich girl.

So I give the movie a 4 out of 5 stars.

As for the story: I suggest you watch the BBC version instead.

Family news: Hot season is here: Time for rolling brownouts

 Here in the Philippines, the hot season starts about now, and will continue until the monsoon starts in late May or June, when afternoon showers usually cool us in the afternoon.

One of the problems is that here in the Philippines, due to the increase in prosperity and population, we use a lot more electricity. 

our electricity gets 14 percent from hydroelectric plants, which of course in the dry season the water level goes down and so does electricity from these source. Hence the talk of reopening the mothballed reactor in Bataan.

but this also means updating the wires, which often as people build up more houses in our area meant tangles of wires along the streets, and often the rice trucks piled high with bags of rice, or other delivery trucks would snag these older sagging wires, resulting in injuries and loss of electric power.

In the past few years, however, they have been replacing the tangled electric wires with high energy cables and transformers.

So today the city had a day long brownout, presumably to fix the wires. Lots of fixing goes on right before elections, which are due in May.

However, brownouts are a lot fewer than when I first moved here back in the mid 2000s. Which is good because the town is now a city and has more and more businesses and new homes being built, at least they were being built before Covid hit and destroyed a lot of jobs.

We have two generators, and when Kuya checked our main generator it needed a new starter, but because he was harvesting rice it couldn't be fixed until today.

I have a smaller back up generator, enough for my house only, not the business part of the compound: mainly for fans and refrigerator, and if I turn everything off it will even let me turn on my airconditioner.

Yesterday I had it cleaned since it was a year since I used it, and I ran that until Kuya came back from the farm and supervised the fixing of the larger generator this afternoon.

God bless those who invented air conditioners. By the way, here they are called aircon... and by having aircon it means that offices are more productive since they can stay open in the hot weather. I do feel sorry for the sick and elderly poor here however: Fans help, but still it stresses the body. 

the prices of air conditioners are way down: a small one is about 10 000 peso (200 USD) but usually a good strong one is two or three times that much. But a lot of folks get money from relatives overseas to help them pay the bills, and the growing middle class are buying them.

And now electric bills are going up, thanks to the increase in prices of coal/oil/ natural gas.

And for farmers: the increase in the price of diesel, plus a huge 40percent increase in the price of fertilizer means a lot of farmers might not make a profit this year, and/or the price of food will go up. 

This is not a good sign.

The election campaigns are starting: Lacson was here the other day visiting the mayor. 

One forgets he is running, since Leni has all the elites excited, but is not popular with the non elites here. And BongBong Marcos is popular, but no one will admit it. No signs for him up in town.

Most of the signs up are for the mayor and/or the governor. And since election violence is alas common here, we are hoping things stay safe here for the next month.

In the meanwhile, it is the anniversary of Lolo's death, so we took flowers to his grave and lit candles and said a few prayers. Sigh.

It is also Joy's birthday, so she bought a cake and I told Kuya just to get a pizza to supplement suppertime.

Yes, we have pizza (Greenwich, and Shakeys and several smaller places and kiosks which heat up frozen pizza for customers). That was not true when I first moved here.

One problem here is that the public hospitals are short of physicians. I don't know what is behind that: but it means a lot of folks are asking for money to see a private physician or go to the small private hospitals in town. A relative of the cook went to dialysis treatment at the public hospitals in the next town and they were understaffed so her treatment was postponed. In the hot weather, that is not good.

She is fairly young and I don't know why she had renal failure; another relative of the cook died due to diabetic kidney failure a few years ago, because dialysis was too expensive. Now it is subsidized but not everyone will get it if they can't find doctors to run the units and/or can't afford the medicines they need to stay alive.

Sigh.

In the meanwhile, schools are open "face to face". The high school students need a vaccine but they aren't giving it to kids yet.

Don't ask me. I have two shots but doubt I will get another, partly because I suspect we all got the omnicron cold when there was a big surge (but we weren't sick enough to get tested). 

Covid is now being considered endemic, not pandemic, meaning it's around but a low level.

latest data: 440 new casea and 208 deaths.

 Tourists can come and enjoy the beaches but they will test them first, but no longer require quarantine.

I will have to check about the latest recommendations for rice delivery: the regulations change all the time, but since our drivers are vaxed they don't need an expensive test before every delivery.

Our mayor had started a child clinic around the corner to treat children and supply medicine for the elderly poor, and give out free rabies shots, but with the pandemic, all these programs are short of money. 

But a new clinic is now opening.

Ukraine analysis

 lots of spin out there, but SP gets it right about countries that I know something about, so here is their analysis.

older analysis:

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Lawnmowers on aircraft carriers?

Lawnmowers can cut and suck up grass and put it into a bag. 

Rumbas can suck up dirt and small objects and put them into a bag.

One important job on an aircraft carrier is to remove debris that can be sucked into and harm a jet engine.

So today's USNIBlog asks: Could a Honda Mean Mower be modified to do this? It could be cheaper and easier to do the job than present day equipment.

Technical discussion for geeks only.

....

and how are the ecology minded bishops helping the rice harvest?

The dirty little secret of farm work:

machines make work easier.

Here Kuya is out harvesting.

In the past, the rice was cut by hand and then taken in bundles to our jeep-thresher to separate the rice from the stem before it was put into sacks for removal to the area where it would be dried.

Now it is easier to rent a thresher harvester to do it.

This is not our farm but it shows an example of using a harvester/thresher in the fields.

and any Green back to nature types who want to make diesel expensive and go back to the good old days; Well, maybe they can spend a day bent over cutting the rice, or threshing it the old fashioned way by pounding it.

Of course we don't bundle the stalks/hay: We let it in the fields and plow it under the mud to rot to fertilize the next harvest. Yes, it produces methane, which is why there has been a move to a drier method of cultivating rice that doesn't require so much flooding. But that means using more fertilizer.

sigh

and we still dry the rice on the roadways or parking lots or tarps, unless it rains and then we need to dry it using a rice drier. Then you need to store it in a dry place until it's time to mill it. We mill it to brown rice, but the shelf life is not as long as white rice.

Farm expenses are skyrocketing, due to the increase in the price of fertilizer and diesel for farm equipment. And that means that six months from now, the price of rice in the big cities will also go up.

Can you say "food riots" children? I was in Liberia where the president raised the price of rice and there was a revolt by the military to remove him. (and this lead to a long nasty civil war). 

so excuse me when the Philippine bishops say they won't invest money into oil/petroleum.

I don't see them wearing a straw hat toiling in the fields in 90 degree weather cutting rice by hand.

Indeed, one of the reasons for mechanizing rice farms is that the land was distributed/bought by the small farmers years ago under land reform: but now these farmers are getting old, and their kids are educated and get jobs in the cities or as OFW often in the Middle East. So we hire workers from other parts of the Philippines to do the work on our fields. There is a limit to how much land you can own, but many returning OFW are buying up farm land and hiring workers too. But it is more cost effective to use machinery to grow rice, so in the last 20 years I have seen the increased mechanization of local farms.

But  what happens when the increase in expenses to grow rice leads to a higher price of rice being sold in the cities? 

There is a large urban poor population. They also are being hit by higher oil prices, not just because food and clothes etc are now more expensive, but because just going to work is becoming more expensive.

The increase in diesel and gasoline is hitting the poor in transportation, and hurting the tricycle and jeepney drivers, who often own their own vehicles and now are facing rising prices; to make things worse, the gov't is pressuring them to get rid of their older vehicles and buy types that are more fuel efficient, which of course they can't afford. .

the increase in LPG means that it is more expensive to cook food: the alternative is polluting wood fires: using wood to cook is a major cause of rural deforestation. 

Yesterday I had to pay 850 pesos for a bottle of LPG for cooking: usually it runs 650, and last month it was 750.

But the real problem is that fertilizer has increased 40 percent and this, plus the higher price of diesel to run both harvesters and the handplow to prepare the field for the next harvest, means we might not make a profit this year.

but that doesn't stop the virtue signaling bishops:

In one of the strongest declarations on climate change to date from the Catholic Church, the bishops of the Philippines have called for the local church to decline any donations with ties to the fossil fuel and extractive industries as part of a full-scale effort to disconnect church finances from the production of coal, oil and gas. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines delivered the directive, along with calling for church institutions to press their banks to phase out fossil fuel holdings

and what do they want to replace these things with? No answer of course. Go back walking to work, and using horse carts to deliver goods to the cities.I had to laugh: they illustrated a muddy street flooded by a typhoon in Manila to show the evil of climate change, but  the dirty little secret is that this means a lack of sewers/ drainage system. And parts of Manila were under sea level and not supposed to be built upon. All of this is infrastructure, and one wonders who is in charge: is the problem lack of money, ignorance of civil engineering, or is the money being diverted into someone's pockets?

I agree that the ecological damage has to be stopped, but they want stop entire industries (putting locals out of work and denying cheap local sources of energy to the poor). There is an alternative: Sustainable mining and forestry, and the use of clean LPG instead of polluting coal.

And there is a lot of natural gas under the West Philippine sea that could benefit the Philippine economy.

That last one is (or should be) one of the priorities of the bishops.

Apparently the bishops didn't notice that if they stop the Philippines from developing these resources, guess who will benefit?

From StrategyPage:

The Chinese strategy is to make it difficult for other nations to fish or search for oil and gas in the disputed waters. China will then offer to negotiate, and share the economic benefits. The other nations will probably be offered some fishing rights in waters of the EEZ of each nation neighboring the South China Sea, but China will keep all the oil and gas outside each nation’s territorial waters (22 kilometers from the coast). ... 

An example of this has been the Philippine efforts since 2005 to conduct oil and gas exploration in the Reed Bank area. Reed Bank is considered part of the Spratly Islands and is 230 kilometers off the coast of the Philippines's Palawan Island, which is well within the internationally recognized EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone)...

Filipino drilling was supposed to start in 2012 but China has blocked all Filipino attempts to exercise those drilling rights. The Chinese are very capitalistic communists and want all they can steal.

Now, if you want to see their heads explode, just mention that Duterte is looking into using nuclear power to supply energy for the Philippines. Even Leni sort of supports it. BongBong is trying to lie low in the discussion because his father built a plant in Bataan that was later mothballed for safety reason. (corruption? shoddy materials? or politics behind the shut down? Probably all three).

 But now South Korea is looking into rehabilitating the plant.

don't ask me. I am old enough to remember when Three Mile Island almost imploded, but didn't (luckily for us, since the Republican governor didn't want to evacuate folks when he was warned of the danger).

But more modern technology has made nuclear power safer... as long as you don't have a 9.0 earthquake plus tsunami as happened in Fukushima.

by the way: If you are wondering why BongBong Marcos is leading in the next election here, the Manila Standard has an article explaining why.

It's the infrastructure stupid. And safety for the ordinary person. And because BongBong is not his father. And don't forget the Smarmatic voting machines, that stole his election to VP and gave it to Leni.

and now there are problems of printing ballots that make some people wondering what is going on.

Don't ask me...I am more worried about local elections: The two clans are running against each other in the elections and we hope no one will get shot this time around.

they signed a peace pact not to kill each other, so hey we're safe 

Sigh.

Musical interlude of the day

Tolkien: The undiscovered Christian

 C.S. Lewis is beloved by many "Christian" intellectuals for his wit and ability to peddle Christian beliefs to the masses. A lot of Protestants who would not touch a statue of Mama Mary with a ten foot pole now consider Lewis a "saint" and he got into Poet's corner for his writings.

Sort of a professional Christian.

I rarely can get thru his theological writings because they are... brittle.  The same could go for his fiction.

Lewis' fictional women are missing something: Perelandra's Eve is stupid, Jane is neurotic and don't get me started on Narnia.

But like most college age students in the 1960s, I got to read Tolkien and loved his books. If Lewis' books are harsh and simplistic, like a Marvel Comic, the Tolkien books remind me of filigree work, or a celtic knot: beautiful when you first look at it, and then even more beautiful as you look again and go into the design. 

That beauty struck me as Catholic, long before I ever heard of the Inklings or found out that Tolkien was Catholic because his world view was that of Catholicism. 

To quote Andrew Greeley:

Catholics live in an enchanted world: a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. The world of the Catholic is haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of Grace.

One of the problems with Vatican II is that the literal minded liturgists and theologians tried to destroy these things, which enabled Catholics to see God in every little thing around them, and replaced it with bad translations, bad music, and the idea if what you do is not social work or "helping the poor" you are not a good Catholic. 

Well there goes the idea of St Therese (and Martin Luther) that even a housewife or factory worker could be holy if they did the duties of their daily life as a way to serve God.

Sigh.

But in Tolkien, the idea that people try to do the right thing but sometimes fail or get sidetracked (e.g. Saruman) is there, as is the idea of forgiveness (Galadriel and Boromir). The tale insists that there is a pattern behind what happens, and that small choices are important. (I told my grandson, who was puzzled about the destruction of the ring, that it was God who arranged Gollem to destroy it, rewarding the decisions of Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, not to kill him when he was defenseless because they pitied him, even though they knew he might harm them later).

However,overt religion is missing from the LOTR because Tokien deliberatly removed any open theology in his work: maybe because as a Catholic working in an anti Catholic and even atheistic culture of Oxford, he decided to follow the example of the Beowulf poet, and make the Christian theme implicit in the story instead of open and preachy.

Anyway,  TeaAtTrianon, herself an author, links to an article discussing if the Catholic church should start the process to declare Tolkien a saint. Not because of his writings, but because of his quiet devotion and love of God that pervaded everything he did. 

Tolkien takes inspiration from the Old English Gospels, in which Jesus himself teaches his disciples (literally “learning knights”) that “ge synd middengeardes leoht,” which directly translates as “you are the light of Middle Earth.” In this way Tolkien embraced a sacramental vision in which the holiness of the Holy Spirit or the Secret Fire, as he puts it, could be seen to illuminate his heroes in their quests and journeys against the forces of Hell.

 But it is in his letters that his faith is more explicit. 

an excerpt) From letter 310 to Camilla Unwin

We ask HOW, perceive patterns and ask WHY, and this implies reasons and motives and a MIND. Only a Mind can have purposes. This introduces the question of a God, a Creator-Designer, a Mind that is partly intelligible to us. This leads to religion and its moral ideas, which are bound up in the bonds we have with others... 

If you do not believe in a personal God, "What is the purpose of life?" is unaskable and unanswerable, since there is no one to whom to direct the question. ...So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.

 One reason Tolkien is so beloved by environmentalism is that he insists that nature is beautiful; but he insists nature is not a God, but that nature echoes the beauty of God. again from his letter:

To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis: Laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour. And in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148, and in The Song of the Three Children in Daniel II. PRAISE THE LORD ... all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.

 Tolkien’s thought on mythology, fairy stories, and the Gospel are also expressed in poem he composed to explain to C. S. Lewis, who had previously struggled with the idea that myths could contain truth, that myths and stories show a fragment of the light of truth, so that we can find in classic pagan authors a glimpse of God.

 

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lots of nonsense about labs and biological warfare out there

 the lab issue going around the internet is nonsense, be it about Wuhan or the Ukraine's labs.

the Russians were claiming they were worried about labs sending anthrax, Bubonic plague, or Weils disease as a form of warfare.

Well, you can get anthrax from the soil all over the world,  since those spores last a long long time. But the spores are big, and to use them as a weapon, you have to grind up spores and keep them from clumping, so it can spread through the air to your lungs. This is hard to do without the proper equipment and training, but it has the advantage that it won't spread person to person and cause an epidemic.

Bubonic plague cases occur in the South West: The Navajo reservation gets a few cases each year, so we IHS docs know about it. It is spread by fleabites and is treatable with antibiotics. The Pulmonary form however is quickly fatal: but only would spread in close contact with a patient who developed pneumonia. Isolation and masks help.

Weils disease is something we see in the Philippines after typhoons and floods, where people are in contact with water that has rat feces. A nasty disease, but again one that can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly.

These labs were about investigating local diseases that could cause epidemics: you analyze the strain of the germ, if it is new or a well known variant. You then can figure out the treatment or make a vaccine to stop it.

Some of this research is risky: especially the reseach where they deliberately change the pathogen to see how it acts in humans, which is what was being done in the USA, until there were a few accidents in US labs so it was banned. But after Obama stopped the risky research in the USA it was funded in China, even though their labs didn't have a good safety record (heck, in 2004 they even accidentally released SARS from one lab).

The dirty little secret is that to be a weapon, a disease must be able to be contained or limited. That means no person to person spread, because once it spreads person to person it can kill everyone, even your own people aka blowback.A biological military threat could be biowarfare but it could also be because of insects, flooding, bad water, or a deliberate release of a pathogen.

There are diseases that have military implications, where you can see outbreaks as part of war. Trench fever (and typhus, both spread by lice) and influenza killed more soldiers than weapons in World War I, but those who did not die often were unable to return to combat quickly. And the malaria caused illness and deaths in the South Pacific region were a real danger to readiness.

and I won't even get into ordinary diseases like Diarrhea. The UN Peacekeepers from Nepal build their latrines in the wrong area, and the result was a cholera epidemic that killed thousands.

Download and read the book on biological threats in wartime LINK

more here

....... 

 the paranoia spead by the anti vaxers is contaminating the ability to discuss these things, and the misinformation by drug companies and the political hacks in the MSM have not helped things, as they censor the free discussion of problems mean that no one trusts them anymore.

the dirty little secret is that this is not an "all or nothing" problem.

all vaccines have side effects, but often are miniscule next to the danger of getting the actual disease.

and although most vaccines work, the dirty little secret is that they don't work all the time, and with time, your immunity goes down. This is what is happening with the various Covid vaccines, but even routine vaccines such as for measles or whooping cough or tetanus don't last forever, so you might need a booster. and vaccines that work 70 percent of the time are commonly used, and the use of "off lable" medicines is common. The biggest scandal might be the censorship of Ivermectin, (which has now been shown not to be a cure all but does cut the risks by half).

Sigh.

In the meanwhile, a doctor who approved of a law to send infectious patients still suffering from covid back to nursing homes, resulting in an estimated 20 thousand deaths in Pennsylvania, is getting another award, not for this but because of being transsexual means never having to say you are sorry. LINK LINK2 LINK3

musical interlude

 Happy St Patrick's day

Pope Francis is destroying Catholicism, and someone finally noticed it

SandroMagister, who writes about what is going on in the Vatican behind the scenes, posts a memorandum that is going around there, and they note a lot of the things that have disturbed ordinary believers (as opposed to cafeteria catholics and the trads). 

the main problem?

The Christo-centricity of teaching is being weakened; Christ is being moved from the centre....

And it notes not just dogmatic errors, which horrify us, but a lot of the financial shennanigans there, which of course have been going on for 2000 years, ever since Judas started diverting Jesus' funds to his own pocket. 

and it notes that the so called "synodality" stuff that he is pushing is nonsense. True, because it uses sociological gobblygook and meetings will be stacked against those of us who actually believe but are too busy serving God in the duties of our daily life to push an agenda at meetings where we know we will be ridiculed... 

headsup Father Z

Read the whole thing.

if Catholicism implodes, or joins with other liberal churches to make a faux church under the philosophy behind the NWO, this has geopolitical implications.

The New space race

 If you are following space exploration, you know that the new space race is not Russia vs NASA in the USA: It is China vs Elon Musk vs Russia, with Europe and NASA coming in last.

StrategyPage has an essay on Elon Musk who just rewrote the book.

and that has geopolitical implications

when Russia invaded Ukraine before dawn on February 24th and the Ukrainian minister of digital transformation contacted Musk for help in dealing with Russian efforts to cut Ukrainian access to the Internet. Starlink officials had already been negotiating with Ukraine to provide Starlink service locally. Musk agreed to help and within four days hundreds of Starlink satellites were moved into position to provide Ukraine with high-speed Internet service using hundreds of Starlink user kits Musk sent to Ukraine.

Russian hackers are trying to prevent this, China is complaining about Starlink satellites being a danger to their space station (not true) and the US environmentalists are doing their best to slow down approval of launch sites.

 For Russia and China, Starlink is but the latest irritation from SpaceX. China is trying to recreate the reusable boosters that make SpaceX launches so much cheaper without making their launch services even more unreliable than SpaceX. From a military point of view, Starlink is a major problem because Russia and China have been creating anti-satellite weapons that could cripple a conventional satellite communications and surveillance system. It would be much more expensive, time-consuming and uncertain to cripple an LEO network that is built around the concept of surviving major damage and continuing to operate,,,,

 

more here....

....

President Obama was first to encourage private space exploration, and this policy was also supported by the Trump administration. This might not be true in the present administration.

BehindTheBlack article about capitalism in space has more details.

Quiet kitty: You'll upset the dogs

I was watching cat videos and the dogs woke up and started looking for the cat:

 

...

all our cats (house cats, garage cats, feral cat visitors, and the neighborhood cats) disappeared about two months ago (?disease? Poison?) but we are now starting to see feral cats again and one yellow one is wandering around the garden trying to decide if she wants to move in.

I hope so: we now have to catch our own mice, who for some reason like to make nests in my wardrobe.

We catch about one a week with sticky traps. Yuck.

in the meanwhile, here is music to calm you and your cat:

Film reviews: What to watch while the world explodes

 the Oscar nominations are not a good guide to escapism or even popularity.

but unlike past years, this year's list includes two family friendly films: Belfast and King Richard. And one for you to explain to your kids who are no longer taught Shakespeare in school: Macbeth.

the film that will probably win a lot of awards for it's originality is the Power of the Dog, which I reviewed in the past. The reviews insist it was about "toxic masculinity" and hey, any film that bashes white guys must be praised.

But as I noted before: The reviews about toxic masculinity is a bit off: The hatred of the woman seems more to be due to his repressed homosexuality, which is not noticed until near the end of the film. 

As a physician, I have seen a lot of depressed women who were the target of similar abuse by such men, who married to get "cured". But in today's world one is not supposed to notice this, even though it is the best argument I can think of for gay marriage.

One wonders how the PC police let that plot get filmed. 

but I agree with Sam Eliott with it's main flaw: They didn't get the culture of Texas cowboys right, (a man who insulted a nice woman in public as was done in the film would have gotten his tush kicked in Texas).

Dune, as I said in a previous blogpost, had beautiful cinematography, but without having read the books, I couldn't understand what was going on. For fans only.

Belfast was a nice quiet film about growing up in a neighborhood where violence was slowly increasing, and it explored the question if one should stay or go if one was in a similar situation. Civil war type situations mean neighbors against neighbors and tears families apart. It could be enjoyable even if one did not know the history of the "Troubles" or the background of the religious hatred there. But the film was about families, not violence or politics, so it is a satisfying film.

King Richard is another family friendly film: About Venus and Serena Williams training for success in tennis with the help of their father. Showing women can succeed, and minorities can break into a white professional sports, was good, in the same happy genre of Rudy, where the underdogs win due to their hard work.

 

Don't look up was stupid. With a capital S. It's an anti American film, where everyone is stupid. Yes, I know it is a satire but it isn't a good satire. It's not funny.
Satire has to be based on reality,  but as I said in my review: it has little to do with today's reality (what, no internet?). One suspects that even if things are that bad in the USA, the asteroid would get zapped by China, or maybe Elon Musk. And I hate films that are unrealistic,

I thought I would enjoy West Side Story, but it began with 12 minutes of discordant music, ugly slum background, and gang members improbably dancing, but no plot to be seen....at which point I turned it off. I'll watch it later for free on HBO. Or maybe just watch the old version. 

One film that surprised me for being good was Nightmare Alley. A noir film and a remake of the classic film from 1947, this film has both plot and characters keep your attention. It should have been promoted more than the more PC films in the list.

Macbeth was an interesting remake of the classic play and altough black and white the cinematography emphasized the black mood of the film and was great. I would love to do an essay comparing it's cinematography to Kurasawa's Throne of Blood.

So that is a summary of most of the films that are available here in Asia.

On the other hand, what everyone will actually watch (and in a theatre) is the lastest Spiderman: With not one, not two, but three Spidies plus Dr. Strange.

Because plot, characters, and special effects are combined into a classic story. But hey, it's Spiderman, so don't expect it to win a prize.

China decimates the Ocean's fish, the Greens stay silent.

China uses intimidation and physical threats to scare our fishermen from their traditional fishing areas in the West Philippine sea. 

I have written about their aggression here in past blogposts, noting that it was Obama who pressured PNoy into not trying to stop them with our miniscule Navy (miniscule compared to China) because if an incident happened, it could have resulted in the mutual defense treaty with the US being invoked, involving the US in a war against China.

Sound familiar? lots of parallels to what is happening in the Ukraine.

But China's decimation of the sea's resources is not only here.

USNavalInstitute Blog has a summary of their economic aggression against small countries by overfishing.

the PRC has already solidified control and is building islands and military installations in areas such as the Spratly and Paracel Islands, and Scarborough Shoals. Outside of the South China Seas, the Chinese fishing fleets have encroached on the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of countries from Africa to South America, such as Argentina and Djibouti, who have very little in the way of individual diplomatic power to protect their territorial integrity and fisheries.

 

..........

There goes Siberia?

 Strategy page has an analysis on China's position on the Ukraine Russian war, and it points out that Russia's military didn't fight as well as expected. Read the whole thing.

But this is the interesting part for those of us in Asia: that Russian military weakness encourages and speeds up China's long term plans to take over Siberia (which is being populated with Chinese and Chinese businesses) and also the influence over the stans that used to belong to Russia but before then were on the silk road.

so what happens when someone asks locals in Siberia if they want to become independent? 

But the economic push back against Russia also warned China of what might happen to them if they invaded Taiwan or expanded their aggression in the West Philippine sea.

the Ukraine debacle and Chinese association with it also weakens Chinese efforts to deal with increasing foreign efforts to make China behave in its dealings with trade partners and curb the Chinese theft of foreign trade secrets and IP (patented Intellectual property).

The United States took the lead in this area back in 2018 with an unprecedented trade war that cost China over half a trillion dollars and forced compliance. This encouraged other victims of the predatory Chinese trade practices.

as Bill Clinton once said: It's the economy stupid.

as the essay discusses, China considers trading partners as "client states", and although actual invasion is rare, the immigrants from China, seeking economic opportunities, has been going on for  hundreds of years.

China is trying to use these immigrants as a way to promote their power in todays world, but as Singapore suggests, it might not work in all areas. (in the Philippines, traditional laws that stop foreigners from owning businessese resulted in intermarriage, hence most of the oligarchy that runs the country are partially Chinese ancestry).

Today, China's diaspora tends to run the economies on SEAsia, (and in more recent years maybe parts of Africa and the silk road states) They send in cheap goods that undermine local industries, they send in developmental projects, and when the poor countries can't pay them back, they steal resources. And often their projects which were seen as providing local jobs were actually staffed by Chinese personnel. (example; the casinos here in the Philippines). 

This is going on in a lot of places that are peaceful thanks to the Pax Americana: so what happens as "big brother" America says it's your problem? Hence all the "wolf warrior"propaganda films coming out of China in recent years...

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

and at the end of the article they discuss the covid coverups: Chinese attempt to blame others for the epidemic is not believed, and that some suspect up to two million in China died of Covid...

Let's go fly a kite

It is already "tag init", the hot season before the monsoon comes in June. Not too hot yet, and there are a lot of nice breezes to keep you cool if you stay under the shade.

And yesterday, while out walking the dog I saw that the kids had started flying their kites.

Lolo showed me how to make a kite similar to what is flown here, but nowadays we have all sorts of kites being flown by the kids: plain kites, box kites, decorative kites etc.

here is a video of kids flying their home made kites:

so who invented kites? The Chinese of course, over 2000 years ago.

 from national kite month webapge:

 

The exact date and origin of the kite is not known but it is believed that they were flown in China more than two thousand years ago. One legend suggests that when a Chinese farmer tied a string to his hat to keep it from blowing away in a strong wind, the first kite was born....

it then spread all over, including down the trade routes to the west. The earliest record of kite use was in China 200 BC when it was used in war.  Full history at the link.

wikipedia however notes that a cave painting from 9000 BC found in Indonesia depicted a kite similar in design to kites still used in that area, LINK2  and is still made from leaves and bamboo in that area. Before Islam, locals used kites to carry messages to heaven, but now use them recreationally.

so maybe the Chinese borrowed the idea from them.

Video on Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment. 

his invention of the lightning rod probably saved many lives.

altogether now:

SNAFU: being paranoid is now normal

 Canadian humorist Mark Steyn comments on the Four Horsemen of the apocolypse.

.

...headsup from TeaAtTrianon.

Yesterday I linked to an article on the PhilInquirer about how the increase in the price of fertilizer will make food costs high and that the increase in costs of fertilizer and fuel etc might make some farmers decide to just not plant this year.

Kuya agreed: He said he is barely making enough to cover his costs, and even though most of our rice is grown with organic fertilizer, we still have some fields that use regular fertilizer, and the price of that has almost doubled, and now the price of fuel/diesel to run the farm machinery is soaring.

the increase in the price of fuel and electricity (which is also going up) will affect the second harvest the most because the second/winter or dry season harvest requires irrigation, which uses either diesel or electricity, and usually this harvest is smaller than the main (summer) harvest.

now, multiply this by thousands of smaller farmers, and you can see that maybe the price of food will go up high so the urban poor won't be able to afford it, and that if farmers don't grow food, there will be less food for people to buy,

In the meanwhile, China if hoarding food, and with war, the Ukraine wheat might not be available. What about US Farmers? They also are discouraged due to Biden's policies that make diesel and fertilzer more expensive, so will we also see some just saying forget about it and not plant, but just take a government hand out?

My Youtube channel just sent this one to my "recommended" list. It is from the University of Chicago, not a right wing fundamentalist site, and it is from 2015, so it predated Trumpieboy.

,,,,

I post this because it echoes a lot of what was discussed in the letter by Cardinal Vigano that I linked to yesterday. Western forces were pushing democracy, with the best of intentions of course.

So where does the Philippines come into this? 

we have an election, and the CIA media who has been anti Duterte for the last few years is now busy supporting Leni, as is the social media and the Catholic bishops, because the alternative is BongBong Marcos with Duterte's daughter as VP.

Now add to this the Chinese pressure and the leftist bots who automatically oppose the USA, and you see the problem

The saying is: When the elephants fight, the grass suffers.

China supplies a lot of our manufactured goods, and a lot of our medicines and even some of our food. So what happens to the Philippines when Taiwan is invaded? There goes our internet, sea routes, fishing, and maybe even a couple hundred thousand refugees landing in northern Luzon.

Sigh.

the paranoid worry about how the elites of the NWO are using these emergencies to push a long planned agenda.

I'd think that was paranoid, except that back in the late 1990s I read Robert Reich's book Work of Nations  (1992)that posited an elite that identified as citizens of the world, and that the hoi polloi of the US would have to be retrained because their low level jobs would go elsewhere. From a book review by Scott London:

"We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century," says Robert Reich. As we move into the borderless economy, the notion of national products, national technologies, and national corporations will become increasingly meaningless. The only thing that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who make up a nation. This shift has enormous political implications, according to Reich. It means that the traditional idea of national solidarity and purpose can no longer be defined in purely economic terms. It also leads to fragmentation, Reich argues, as "those citizens best positioned to thrive in the world market are tempted to slip the bonds of national allegiance, and by so doing disengage themselves from their less favored fellows."

So what about those left behind? Reich says the 1990s equivalent of "learn to code". 

 from the early 2000s we also have The Pentagon's new Map, LINK2 that posits a similar tranformation (he sees the Philippines as a cheap source of trained labor. Duh). from a 2013 video

from 2016: the "Great Reset" plan has been around for awhile.

,..

start at 25 minutes...let them eat cake (on the dole it's no problem). and fuck the middle class who now lost their jobs. And they ridicule Brexit as being a Luddite populism.

Sigh.

I am old enough to remember when it was the left who held these points of view, about the evils of big business exploiting the world (Chomsky anyone?). But my opinion was that if they were correct, they also didn't consider the alternative: Poverty and stagnation.  

Things are complicated.

The introduction of robots to replace workers mean a lot of people with no meaningful work. The sexual revolution means no meaningful relationship with your family. The feminist revolution means making women into men, ignoring that they have babies and do this the best when supported by family. Heck, I remember when Betty Frieden who started the feminist revolution, was thrown out of the feminist movement because she insisted that she and most women didn't hate men or want to destroy the family, but only wanted a way to have a family but also use their skills outside the home.

But what do you do with all those out of work? I am reminded of the stories of the Irish Potato famine, that noted that afterward the inefficient small farms were replaced with more efficient methods of farming... the problem was: so where did those who were forced to leave? The Malthusian ideas were around already, and the plans to make the farmlands more efficient were already known, but it took the potato fungus to implement the plans.

Is it paranoia if you just quote them?

The Tolkien comment that maybe communism was Mordor, but that the west was Saruman, willing to use the ring of power to impose a benevolent dictatorship.

all they want to do is to Serve Man...

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update; GetReligion blog has had several posts on the Ukraine, from the religion and history point of view, LINK  LINK2 LINK3 and today notes about the fairly large Jewish population there.

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update: well well well: was there a coverup of Vaccine injuries?

Waiting for Dr. C to be cancaled in 1....2...3