But now the Phil Inquirer has a AFP article that quotes Financial Times saying he is quietly living in Japan.
Much of the article sort of pretends he got in trouble because China is cracking down on internet stuff,
In recent years, Chinese officials have taken aim at alleged anti-competitive practices by some of the country’s biggest names, driven by fears that major internet firms control too much data and expanded too quickly.
for those of you outside of Asia, Jack Ma founded AliBaba, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon, that allowed rural folk to order stuff that once required you to go to the city and search the markets to find.
On an African note
“Your mission is not to save a dying world. No civilization has the promises of eternal life. Your mission is to live out with fidelity and without compromise the faith you received from Christ.”
something to remember when reading the blasphemy of the day on the internet news.
I am still recovering from dengue so blogging will remain light.
...since VP Harris is on a visit here, this aggression is especially an open confrontation not just to the Philippines but putting up a finger to the USA.
According to Filippino Navy officials, after their sailors had captured and was towing a piece of space floating rocket debris back to shore, the Chinese Coast Guard arrived and forcibly seized it, cutting the tow line...
Whether or not the Chinese took this debris by force or not, the fact remains that it existed, indicating once again that China is dropping rocket parts indiscriminately on other nations. In this case the debris probably came from either a first stage or a strap-on booster, released shortly after the launch from a low enough altitude that it doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere.
AlJ report from 15 sept discusses previous times when debris fell in the waters near the Philippines in July, and of course the story, if the corrupt US MSM covers it at all, they say hey no one was hurt, so stop complaining.
but the area is not disputed: It belongs to the Philippines, but Obama pressured then President Aquino not to stop them when they started digging up the seabed and destroying the ecology to build their militarized islands. Instead, Obama pressured the Philippines to take it to the world court, who agreed that this area belonged to the Philippines, but of course, who is going to require them to follow international law?
why is all of this important?
If the debris hits a nearby town, or sinks a fishing ship or maybe even an airplane, it could kill people. And China is aware of the problem, but just bullies it's way out of being criticized for their continued failure to control rocket part reentry.
Dr Angi had a party for them with the relatives on Saturday and kuya had a party with our friends yesterday.
No, I didn't go: I am still sleeping 18 hours a day and don't have much appetite for all that lovely food.
Yum. BBQ Talapia from our fish pond, BBQ squid, pancit, caldereta, fruit salad, etc.
I stuck with a bit of pancit, thank you, and went to bed at 7 pm.
Kuya is busy at the farm so although he supervised our party, he didn't go to the family reunion party. The good news is that it rains on and off. This is good because it means we can prepare the fields for the winter grow without paying oodles of money for irrigation. The bad news? The last crop was small due to the typhoon, and we are having trouble drying it in the sunlight, and the line to get it dried electronically at the rice mill is long and would cost more than we are willing to pay.
I am still recovering from Dengue Fever, and with this epidemic causing a lot of illness in SE and South Asia, some sites are noticing a post Dengue syndrome of fatigue and achiness and brain fog in up to half of those with severe disease.
this actually is seen after a lot of viral and bacterial infections, but in the olden days it was considered common and normal so you just labored on despite the problems (or if you were a woman you took to bed: why middle class women suffer more from these things may be because of biology or maybe because we feel things more).
What you have to realize is that the Philippines is in the midst of a Dengue epidemic, but that statistics might not be accurate:
mild cases of dengue never get diagnosed because fevers are common and hey who wants to get checked for Covid and maybe go into isolation etc. when it is probably just a fever;
There are a lot of cases of Dengue locally, mainly in kids. And yes, covid is still around: One of our relatives visiting for Undas (Nov 1, when we commemorate the dead) caught it and has been in quarantine for two weeks and is now fit to go back to the USA.
So anyway, the hype and hysteria of the MSM is all about Covid, but now that someone got Dengue in Arizona expect to read lots of propaganda blaming it on global warming.
Except it's not global warming: it's the mosquitoes, and the spread via populations moving around taking the disease with them.
If you have to point a finger at someone to blame, then blame Rachel Carson who demonized DDT and essentially led to banning it's use to kill mosquitoes, because it was killing eagles, so this cheap prevention was banned.
But of course, you don't need DDT: You need to drain puddles and sitting water to destroy the larvae which are wiggling in the water but breathe air. There are several ways to do this: Fish will eat the larvae, which is why we had koi and then talapia in our water fountain, and it is why the city covered the open drainage ditches a couple years ago. And spraying sitting water with light oil (or in today's world, insecticide) will kill the larvae.
There are a lot of scary diseases out there, and some that we presume cause only epidemics in poor countries were once common in Europe and nothern USA.
So why worry about mosquitoes? Well, Dengue for one. But the same mosquito that carries Dengue also spreads yellow fever.
and it killed more soldiers in the Spanish American war in Cuba than the enemy...but after the Spanish American war, public health authorities decided the best way to stop it was to eradicate the mosquito
this article is about the history of Yellow fever.
The Yellow Fever Commission, founded as a consequence of excessive disease mortality during the Spanish–American War (1898), concluded that the best way to control the disease was to control the mosquito.
William Gorgas successfully eradicated yellow fever from Havana by destroying larval breeding sites and this strategy of source reduction was then successfully used to reduce disease problems and thus finally permit the construction of the Panama Canal in 1904. Success was due largely to a top-down, military approach involving strict supervision and discipline (Gorgas, 1915).
in 1946, an intensive Aedes aegypti eradication campaign was initiated in the Americas, which succeeded in reducing vector populations to undetectable levels throughout most of its range.
much of this was before the vaccine was developed in 1930s, and before DDT was developed in the 1940s.
A couple years ago, there was a major epidemic of yellow fever (2016) in Angola which was controlled partly from the vaccine ... eventually 25 million people got the vaccine.... and a few local Chinese workers brought it back into China, which diagnosed the cases and stopped the disease before it spread to the public.
Alas, the vaccine shortage badly affected Brazil, (2017-2018) where yellow fever hides in the monkeys of the jungle and gives them outbreaks every couple of years.
By the way, this mosquito also carried Zika.
Remember those screaming headlines showing poor ladies in Brazil and their microcephalic babies? But the dirty little secret is that the powers that run the world were exaggerating the risk of fetal malformation (which were rare in other countries with the disease) in order to pressure governments to legalize abortion, and also so they could use the newfangled genetically modified mosquitoes and other fancy methods to stop the epidemic. Yes, zika did cause fetal malforation, but some greens wonder why this was mainly true on the poorer areas of Brazil but the problem was less severe in other areas of South America, and that maybe chemical exposure was involved.
But where is the hysteria in the MSM about Dengue?
And heaven help the world if another epidemic of yellow fever gets out of control: International travelers from high risk countries are required to show they had yellow fever vaccine, but no one in the US seems to be worried about those crossing the border without papers.
In summary: Dengue (and Zika and Chikunguya fever and even Yellow Fever) are spread by mosquitoes that are not being controlled: so outbreaks of these diseases are not due to global warming: it's the failure of the public health departments that are not controlling mosquitoes.
Dengue spread started in this century, partly due to soldiers and civilian populations moving around after World war II. And it tends to be in urban areas, where it can spread from person to person and there are a lot of areas with puddles and sitting water where the mosquito can breed. And as I mentioned before, a lot of mild cases and asymptomatic cases never get diagnosed, but if a mosquito bites them it can spread to others.
Is there a vaccine? Yes, but if given to people who never had deangue, it can incrase the risk of the severe form of Dengue.
The children of the poor neighborhoods of Manila were the guinea pigs for this flawed vaccine which was given to 700 thousand children. but reportedly killed half a dozen kids who developed the severe frm of dengue as a result. NPR report here.
But after these deaths were reported, the distrust of any vaccines led to parents skipping their baby's routine shots, so we had measles and polio cases...
and this is one reason that the public health authorities of the Philippines, who were offered thousands of doses of the mRNA vaccine in January 2021 never signed off on the papers to get it early. The problem was that the DOH had to agree to lift liability for side effects of the shot and they didn't quite trust the drug companies. As a result, the public covid campaign was delayed for months (although some people were getting the Chinese vaccine privatly, and some mayors were importing the shots, the public vaccine outreach was delayed: I got my Astrozeneca shot in August, and the mRNA wasn't available here until later in the year.)
Yes, Covid was real, and we knew young and old who died of it, but now, despite a large number of cases in public health surveys, the death rate remains low, while people are dying of other diseases, like undiagnosed cancer, untreated high blood pressure and diabetes, etc.
as for the anti vax hysteria against the covid vaccine: what you need to know is that the original covid killed a lot of high risk folk, so the initial push to give the high risk folks vaccine saved lives.
But now most cases are of the milder omicron strain of covid, where there are lots of cases but few deaths. And I wonder if Dengue is now surging in Asia is because the public health department was busy fighting covid with tests, masks, vaccines, and isolation, they don't have a lot of money left over to stop the mosquitoes.
But despite this, some big shots insist on giving shots and boosters galore to everyone: Not just to elders and high risk people but also to kids and young adults, who are not at high risk. To make things worse, there is some suspicion that numerous boosters (not a single shot) might be behind the epidemic of myocarditis and clots in young people...,
So no, I am not anti vax: But the anti vax hysterics do have a point that the response was excessive and the hysteria pushing shots to low risk folk at a time when the covid strain going around is much weaker than the original one means this response might now be a bit overblown.
But the real problem was the shut down of society, which is causing a recession.
Flatten the curve: makes sense. But for two years? And after they had given the vaccine to high risk folks?
To make things worse, the powers that seem to be running the world are busy pushing global warming, knowing that hey their propaganda to make people obey them worked in the epidemic, so let's expand our power to get rid of fossil fuel.
Dirty little secrwet: between the economic shut down and the anti fossil fuel hysteria of the powers that run the world, we here in Asia are facing a huge famine in the next year or two: and it is man made and preventable.
The anti fossil fuel policies such as being pushed by the Biden and Trudeau administrations, (plus Russian aggression against the Ukraine) are the real reasons that the world is facing a major famine in the next year or two.
Here in the Philippines, farmers (like our family) rely on disel and gasoline to run farm machinery to irrigate, harvest, mill and dry the rice crop. (we still plant by hand, but those machines are commonly used in other Asian countries and they too need diesel to run).
Then there is the huge increase in the price of fertilizer (including organic fertiizer which we use for our organic rice crop). This is a world wide problem.
Add to that the price to transport or import rice to feed the poor in the cities.
We probably won't make a profit this year thanks to the increase price of diesel and the huge increase in the price of fertilizer.
I was flat on my back in the hospital during the election kerfuffle. But now that things have settled a lot of stories have been discovered and publicized, a few days after the election of course... if publicized a month ago might have changed things.
The crypto currancy debacle for one: And the fact that both the press and many politicians were essentially bribed by them, and a lot of their investor's money went to change the election. EdDriscoll at Instapundit has the latest.
So did the FBI raid their offices? And what about the politiicans who were bribed by them given campaign contributions?
Don't ask me.
But the FBI has been busy raiding the real dangerous folk in the USA:
if you are bored with superheroes, hit men/women portrayed as heroes, and Hallmark movies where attractive young women in their 30s who find the handsome articulate man of their dreams then I have a suggestion for you.
The movie, the Lost King, is a quiet story behind the finding of the remains of King Richard III, told from the point of view of the person who doggedly pushed the idea that his body could be found, and his reputation rehabilitated from the fake news pushed by the Tudors.
....
yes, that's Paddington Bear's mom (Sally Hawkins) playing Phillipa Langley, a quirky amateur behind the search to find where he was buried. She raises money and gradually gets the city's permission to dig up the car park where the now destroyed abbey was probably located. And while working with professionals, she was eventually sidelined by the experts, who after all had all those lovely credentials.
The UKGuardian has this article about her and her search for the Lost King:
The Lost King isn’t really about Richard III at all. I think it’s about Langley and the intensity of her fascination. She is brought vividly – and quite stressfully – to life by Sally Hawkins...To stick my neck out further, I think the film’s deeper philosophical inquiry is about the wisdom we gain collectively from people who are obsessional and tenacious.
As a film, I give it a three out of four stars.
here is a short interview with Philippa Langley, the woman portrayed in the film.
----------------------
compare and contrast:
this is an official (boring) documentary, about the search for the remains of Richard III.
linked to watch at my leisure. I am still recovering from dengue so will have to watch and think about these when I recover.
Peter Kreeft is interviewed by Jordan Peterson
........I often post Dr. C because he analyzes the data and makes it easy to understand (then he provides links to check the data). But he has been warned by youtube censors.
The problem? Science is not a religion that can't be questioned, but is about evidence, and he is pointing out the censorship about the covid problems... ..........
I am too old to figure out cryptocurrancy stuff, but a recent collapse of a major company is making ripples in the financial world but not getting a lot of publicity.
NEW YORK--It took less than a week for FTX to go from the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world to bankruptcy court.
The embattled cryptocurrency exchange, short billions of dollars, sought bankruptcy protection after the exchange experienced the crypto equivalent of a bank run. ... FTX US, which originally was not expected to be included in any financial rescue, was also part of the company's bankruptcy filing.
connect the dots"?
CEO and founder Sam Bankman-Fried has resigned, the company said. Bankman-Fried was recently estimated to be worth $23 billion and has been a prominent political donor to Democrats.
however, there are a lot of fingers in the pie: not just in the USA.
Lots of money floating around out there which makes us wonder WTF is going on.
Internet magic money (aka crypto) billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, is the man behind FTX, a crypto exchange. He seems to have angered fellow magic money billionaire and fremeny, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ and CEO of the rival exchange Binance. It might have to do with FTX cozying up to regulators to get the regulations beneficial to the FTX but not its rivals.
Last week, the FTX balance sheet was leaked to crypto news site Coindesk, which effectively caused a run on the exchange by exposing the financial ties between FTX and Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm also owned by SBF. The balance sheet showed that FTX’s finances were a paper tiger and ripe for plundering.
That guy is a Chinese ethnic Canadian, who as we know has nothing to do with China. (LOL)
But I thought China made bitcoin illegal last year, because the gov't couldn't regulate the money.
So is bit coin stuff a way to avoid governement interference, or is this just the latest ponzi scheme to defraud the naive?
This film is typical of western films about that tragedy: emphasizes the cathedral is part of art and culture... no, no god here, no mary and especially not a symbol of Catholic belief....
...
An older film about the cathedral is here:
this is a recent French film about the fire:<
and Netflix has a planned miniseries based on the story of the firefighters.
as best I can find, over 400 firefighters were involved, three were injured but none died fighting the fire.
...
the UKGuardian notes that the French film showed the rescue of the relics, scoffing that these were merely medieval fakes so why are people busy risking their lives rescuing nonsense instead of figuring out who started the fire.
....except of course, those rescuing the relics are not exactly experts in forensic science of fires... as Bones would say: I'm a doctor mere Catholic believer, not a member of the CSI team.
......
as for those medieval relics Here is a PBS segment about it:
......
Ironically, the attempt to dechristianize culture has resulted in more interest in the numinous/supernatural, (which can be religious or occultic) GetReligion discusses this phenomenum here.LINK
.....................
A lot of Korean dramas include their folk beliefs in ghosts, nine tailed foxes, etc. and the idea that those in a coma might have their soul becoming a ghost like pesence or even enter into a historical figure is common... Ironically, our Objbwe patients had a similar belief about the souls of those in a coma . more HERE
And of course here in the Philippines, although the elite are into either Protestantism or New age practices, here in the country, we still have shrines of Mama Mary all over, pray the rosary at night, put flowers and candles on the graves, etc. because it is part of the cultural belief system...
there are a lot of ghost stories that are believed. No, the reason we go to a restaurant after attending a funeral is because we're hungry, not because we want to confuse the ghost and keep him from following us home.
The lab leak from the Wuhan lab was censored early in the story, but now the evil Republicans in the US Congress investigated and found, uh, maybe it was an accidental leak.
Dr. C reviews their report (he is in danger for being canceled so he only quotes experts now).
Virus likely needed to circulate in an intermediate host
An animal virus must evolve to gain human infecting potential
Closest virus is in horseshoe bats residing in Southern China or Southeast Asia
Epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak Differs from Previous Natural Zoonotic Spill overs ...
Genetic similarity between the environmental samples and human viral samples,
supports the likelihood that the virus found at the Huanan Seafood Market was shed by humans...
The left usually is the one who spills the beans on such things,
Apparently they too checked the data and found it suspicious.
Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.
The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.
Vanity Fair and ProPublica spoke to experts who said that the timeline of Zhou’s vaccine development seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. Two of the three experts said it strongly suggested that his team must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.
The authors of the interim report do not claim to have definitively solved the mystery of COVID-19’s origin. “The lack of transparency from government and public health officials in the [People’s Republic of China] with respect to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion,” the report says...
