That about says it all

 Randall Smith at the Catholic Thing has an essay about the absurdity of the synodality nonsense (that the big shots in the Catholic church are spending oodles of money pushing)

“The North American Synod Team” says they “heard through the synodal consultations that our people are asking for more robust formation” in synodality and in going out to those on the “margins” of society.

 

It’s odd because I am hearing different voices: from people who want to know how to raise their families; how to live in a society that is increasingly antagonistic toward them; how to ensure their children are getting a good education and formation in the faith. The last thing they want to deal with is Church bureaucracy. They want that part of their lives to just be there for them so they can focus on other things. What to do with a sick elderly parent? How to take care of a disabled child who their Catholic schools won’t take? How to deal with children poisoned by the toxic culture? The document fails to touch on any of these concerns.

italics mine 

A lot of us figure this is a "top down"way to manipulate people in the pew to accept the reformers (such as those in Germany) who have an agenda: And if you object, they can say you are against the Holy Spirit.

But as the author points out: It has little or nothing to do with Jesus, God, or the faith of ordinary Catholics.

And every time I hear PC language about inclusivity etc I am reminded of Gresham's law: bad money drives out good money.

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

 

In other news, I am reading about an incorrupt (i.e. intact) body of a dead nun found in the central USA when the sisters of the Monastery she founded was expanding their buildings, and they decided to rebury her bones inside the church.

But when they did this last week, they were astonished to find her body intact. 

One of them mentioned it in an email, and soon the rumor went around and oodles of folk started traveling to their monastery to view this "miracle"

Here is a short snip about this.

One can almost hear the eyerolls of good Protestants and unbelievers who think the whole thing is a sham at best or just a fraud to raise money.

Behind what is going on here: There is a Catholic idea that sometimes saints bodies remain intact, as a sign by God that they are holy.

This is not just a Catholic idea: Buddhist monks come to mind. But of course, just finding an intact body doesn't mean that person is a saint:  mummies in the desert and the bog bodies and bodies found in ice like Otzi or the Peruvian human sacrifices come to mind.

The experts undoubtably will find a "scientific" explanation of it, and it wouldn't bother me a bit: Because God often uses natural methods to make a point.

So what would the point of this absurdity?

Well, like most good Catholics, a lot of what we call might call miracles is just coincidence. We are in need, and someone just happens to come to help us. When I was in Africa, and took time off to attend medical lectures, I worried about leaving the hospital with no physician. The nuns assured me I shouldn't worry because God knew I was gone, and it was his responsibility. And so, sometimes a medical emergency would occur five minutes before I left, or five minutes after I arrived back from the conference....

Coincidence? Or a sign that God is in control?

so there is an intact body of a nun...is this a miracle or just a natural phenomenum. 

Both. And believe me, I am sure the bishops are gnashing their teeth at this inconvenient occurance.

But what I find interesting is the timing of this happening... coincidence? 

Well, first of all, the nun was African American. Critics laughed at this and I have seen comments saying cynically I guess the US needs a Diversity saint. 

But it does remind people that there are indeed African American Catholics, and Sister Wilhemina taught in Catholic school for years before she left to found this monastery to pray full time.

But at a time when the Pope is busy shutting down convents that do nothing but pray for us sinners, it also could be God (or the nuns) sending him a message to let them alone.

A lot of us noticed that these nuns wore full habits, and the monastery was founded by a group that supports the Latin mass, an act that upsets Pope Francis more than bishops trying to destroy that commandment about adultery.

And of course, all of this happened in a week when the PC Dodgers are planning to honor a hate group of drag queens who ridicule Catholic nuns... 

Coincidence?

Don't tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor about all of this.

Memorial day

 

.

..remembering one of my classmates who died in VietNam and received the Medal of Honor for his heroism

Michael Crescenz and a fellow soldier, base camp, South Vietnam, 1968. Photo credit Family photo

VFW Post 2819 was renamed in his honor, followed by the VA hospital a year later. In 2016, they erected a statue of him at Philadelphia’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Penn’s Landing. “This is for the sacrifice of Philadelphians from that war,” Joe said. “That’s why these guys did what they did; to honor Michael and all the other men that never came out.

He was buried near his family, but as his parents got older, and his siblings were no longer nearby, his family requested he be buried in Arlington Cemetary. So when his body was exumed, our class attended the mass in his honor, and then many of my classmates accompanied him, along with a escort of honor, to Artlinton from Philadelphia.

A lot of what people now remember about that war is written by the left. True, the government of Vietnam was corrupt  (ask the guys who fought there) , but the communist takeover was worse, because it resulted in a tyranny. 

Of course, in the USA, you never hear the other side of the story because those opposing it were affluent upper class types who opposed the war because it was trendy and it made them feel heroic, 

They never asked themselves what would have happened if the US hadn't fought there, nor did many of them help resettle the 3 million refugees who fled.

 How many remember the ethnic cleansing of the Chinese community and the Montagard people, religious refugees,  boat people (800 thousand), and reeducation camps (200 thousand at least)were pretty well ignored as they went on to later trendy matters.

UKGuardian notes:

'Around 800,000 boat people, as they became widely known, are believed to have fled Vietnam by sea. Many others drowned or were captured, raped and killed by pirates, particularly from Thailand...250,000 Vietnamese refugees admitted by the US and 60,000 by France. '

Yet because of the fight, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines did not fall to communism. And as the children of the refugees remember the past, they will continue to influence America in many ways: By rewriting the history books, and by pressuring the USA to accept refugees from the wars going on at the present time.

The Gun problem is suicide, not death by cop

 CDC report on violent deaths in the USA.

Of the 66,017 deaths, the majority (58.4%) were suicides, followed by homicides (31.3%), deaths of undetermined intent (8.2%), legal intervention deaths (1.3%) (i.e., deaths caused by law enforcement and other persons with legal authority to use deadly force acting in the line of duty, excluding legal executions), and unintentional firearm deaths 

The suicide rate was highest in men over the age of 85, but more comon in males who had substance abuse or recent domestic problems. And ll the propaganda happy publicity pushing the idea the old should die when sick will make this worse.

The homicide rate was higher among young black males. And most women who were killed it was partner abuse. But the MSM prefer to point to the 1 percent of legal interventions that cause deaths because it sells newspapers and demonizes folks who just want their nieghborhood to be safe.

The ethnic groups with the highest suicide rate was AmerIndian populations, something we who worked with the IHS were aware was a problem. But many of them were hanging, not gunshot wounds.

add to this the drug overdose deaths (90 thousand a year) and the 13 thousand deaths from driving under the influence of alcohol and a lot of people driving under the influence of drugs where the statistics are not clear, what you have is a social epidemic.

Tonga volcano caused your GPS system to wobble and other science stories

it is not just solar flares that can knock out satellites etc.

 Science alert story about the eruption of the Tonga volcano in Jan 2022.

The volcanic eruption in Tonga in January 2022 was so large, it created waves in the upper atmosphere that constituted their own form of space weather. It was one of the largest explosions in modern history and impacted GPS across Australia and Southeast Asia. As we describe in our new study in the journal Space Weather, the eruption caused a super "plasma bubble" over northern Australia that lasted for hours.

the article has the technical details of superbubbles, that compare this to the designs you see when you add cold cream to your coffe.

More in this video...

No reports if the huge explosion would affect the weather (Mt Pinatubo lowered the world temperature for a year or two if I remember correctly).

Luckily the eruption only killed three people according to this report.

But there is another volcano that might cause a major disaster:...The UKGuardian has lots of photos:
...a lot depends if it just has local lava flows, or local pyroclastic flows... and of course, the dust and sulfur can cause asthma and the dust when it rains can collapse houses.

Sigh.

the problem about evacuation is that, if they evacuate and nothing happens, then the next warning will mean people will ignore the warning and stay put. Often most of the family will leave but leave one person to guard their possessions against looting, and of course the dust can kill farm animals and crops.

In the meanwhile, here in the Philippines, we are watching the typhoon that just devestated Guam that might be heading our way.

It is; very large which means the areas affected by wind and rain are larger. 

UPI says it could affect not just the Philippines but Taiwan, China, and Japan.

And it is traveling slowly, which means that the rains will last longer than if it travels quickly, and of course flooding is a major problem. It will probably only hit north of here but we are downstream from the mountains of northern Luzon so floods are a worry.

right now, we are having heavy thunderstorms every evening (the yearly monsoon rains) which is good because it means less of a need to pay for irrigation pumps to flood the fields to prepare them for rice.

But it also means the soil is saturated, so even if we only are hit by the edge of this typhoon, flooding as water runs downstream from the nothern mountains added to the monsoon rains, is a bigger danger.

Public Health initiative that saved millions of Africans

Bet you never heard about a program called PEPFAR.

Why? Because it was proposed by a Republican president. (and continued by the presidents who came after him).

But mainly because it only saved a couple of million Africans.

We probably had HIV when I was working in Zimbabwe, because we had people with Kaposi's sarcoma and people who died of what seemed to be a failure to fight ordinary infections in what should have been healthy people.

It wasn't until I had returned to the USA  in the 1980s, that they discovered that this was HIV. And for years, this slowly killed people in Africa. And even after there were medications that slowed the progress of the disease, it was simply too expensive for most people in Africa to afford.

Until President Bush decided to do something about it.

One of my friends in Zimababwe lost both her brothers, but later the wife and daughter of one of them was placed on medicine and survived. Alas, the daughter, who was in the first year of college, died with a different infection, but withouth PEPFAR she would have died as an infant.

Some criticized the program because it took resources from other programs, and the PC criticized the stress on abstinence (and polygamy rather than sharing prostitutes) as part of the program, being clueless that these were consistant with African customs.

Here is the CDC page on PEPFAR in Zimbabwe:

you have to test people, and test their contacts, and put them on treatment.

The hospital where I had worked had an outreach program, and our sisters had a clinic in Harare, until it was destroyed by Mugabe in his Operation Murambatsvina program which was explained as a way to clear out the slums, but in reality destroyed the areas that voted against him.

Right now, the international public health programs are getting a lot of hostility, much of it hysterical and political in origin. 

The coverup of the Covid origin and the initial denial of the WHO head that it could be spread person to person is part of the reason, as is the over reaction by governments to the epidemic that shut down the economy, something that will kill a lot more people than covid.

like the boy who cried wolf, the WHO has lost credibility and some see their plea (send us oodles of money ) as another power grab.

Yet it was the USA, not the WHO, who started the program to treat people with HIV in Africa. Public health is not a monolith, although groups do cooperate with each other in providing medical care.

Yet one does have to remember that this program has saved millions of ordinary Africans.

Happy Towel Day

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

 

Family news

Ruby Graduates from college in the USA this weekend, and Joy has scheduled to fly there this weekend, and arrive the day before. The problem?
Another day, another typhoon.

It should enter the Philippine areas of responsibility Friday or Saturday, but it's not clear if it will hit us or not when it gets closer. But it could interfere with her flight.

Kuya is not attending: it is the start of the rice planting season. The irrigation water will be turned on June 1, so they can flood the fields to destroy weeds which are then plowed under using a handplow (large rototiller) or sometimes a waterbuffalo. Once this is done, the seedlings are planted by hand, but as the Philippines becomes more affluent, it is only a matter of time until we get machines to do this.

When you do this, you often analyze the soil so add the needed minerals to help the rice to grow.

So it will start being busy.

Typhoons are common here. No not global warming. El Nino or EL Nina cycle is the new way to designate the weather cycles. El Nino is named for the warm tides off of south America near the feast of the Christ child.

No, it is not a new a weather cycle but one that has occured for a long time and that can cause destruction as the Incas realized.

Another trust issue in medicine

The covid epidemic, and the over reaction to it by those in charge, has caused a lot of people to distrust the medical system.

But there is another reason that will soon be causing more distrust: No, not racism per se, but ableism: The idea that the old, the handicapped, and those who can't quite cope with life are looked down on.

From a talk by John Kelly, a spokesman for the disability group not dead yet , discussing how he has to confront the healthy minded elites who push assisted suicide but if you look more closely than the propaganda, (or watch what is starting to happen in Canada etc.) you might be more frightened: because the backstory is eugenic elimination of the unfit.

I keep thinking about Canada, where people like me – I’m a quadriplegic paralyzed below the shoulders, but I am not terminally ill – have become eligible for their so-called “aid in dying” program – and by aid in dying Canada means euthanasia 99.9% of the time.

At first, Canada legalized euthanasia/assisted suicide for people whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable,” but then expanded eligibility. There have been documented cases of disabled people being offered euthanasia instead of services

In the US, proponents insist they only seek assisted suicide for people labelled “terminally ill,” meaning death is probable within six months, but there have already been calls to expand eligibility

the stories you hear has a cultural background and mindset of those affluent elites who claim to speak for the poor and working class of all ethnicities. 

...Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school...noted that most of those who have used aid-in-dying laws are white, well insured and college-educated. “These are people who are used to controlling every aspect of their lives, and they want to control this aspect of their lives.”

But they seem unaware that there is a different way to look at life, especially by those who work hard and have struggles in their lives. 

And part of this is because these groups have a religious viewpoint of life: The idea that God is in charge, and this illness, or sickness, or problem is one of the struggles he has given us. It is also a knowledge, based on experience, that bad things happen, even to good people, but there is an ultimate reason for everything that happens, and that God, and family, and friends will help you in your need (remember even in the USA, which if you watch TVs and movies is full of selfish people with few family responsibiities, nevertheless has 50 million people who help family or a friend as an unpaid caregiver).

Without recognizing this cultural divide, such issues cannot be discussed clearly.

So it's voluntary, so what's the big deal? Well, because once giving out death is seen by personnel as a medical treatment, then some medical personnel will decide to give this treatment to those who don't want it.

Let me tell you a story. I was doing a temporary job at an IHS hospital on one of the Lakota reservations, when at change of shift, one of the regular docs came to the ER and asked if we could check an x ray for feeding tube placement on an older lady who was recovering from a stroke. 

The night shift ER docwas a locum from a professional group, and was a resident at a big hospital in the Eastern USA, and when he heard the request, he said blithely, well why don't you just sedate her HaHa. I was horrified, but knowing the my next door neighbor was in the AIM and would stop this fatal intervention, I stayed quiet to see what would happen.

 And to my relief, the staff doctor merely said: Oh, we don't do that type of thing here. And walked off to tell the nurses he would drive back later in the evening to check on the patients...(and later we made sure he would not be allowed to work there).

Incidents like this are why minorities often refuse to sign do not resussitate orders

and as Mr Kelly notes, it may be why the popularity of killing off the sick and handicapped are not as popular in much of America: not just among minorities but among the working class whose opinions are usually dismissed because they are "racist"and "deplorables" so are looked down upon by those in charge of the culture.

A 2013 Pew Research Center study showed that Blacks oppose assisted suicide by 65%-29%, and Latinos by 65%-32%. Majority Latino Lawrence, Massachusetts, voted 69% against the 2012 Argos question, while white working class towns like Taunton and Gardner also opposed. Wealthier Massachusetts towns voted heavily in favor.

Sigh.

That's a nice power grid you got... it''d be a shame if something bad happens to it

 Right now I am watching an ANC talk show discussing that China pretty well runs the electric grid here. They are wondering why why there has been a lot of brownouts recently. 

The franchise ends 2058 and they are discussingif the gov't can get out of the agreement because of all the brownouts recently. The alternative is to have the gov't run the electric grid, as they did in the past.

the problem? China owns a large percentage  of the franchise, the rest being owned by local businessmen

GMANEWS:

The 40 percent ownership of State Grid Corporation of China in the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) won’t pose a national security threat, the NGCP assistant corporate secretary told the Senate energy committee Wednesday.

.

Watch the whole thing. 

Wikipedia on the franchise.

and a lot of senators (May 21 2023) want Chinese investors to be removed from owning the power grid.

the power company says no threat at all, and insists that the technicians running the grid are local Filipinos.

Problem? the manuals on how to do this are written in Chinese. (other reports say no, they have been translated into English or tagalog).

And although the corporation insists that China couldn't turn off the grid remotely, reports from a few years ago said actually they could.

BBC Nov 2019

China's State Grid Corp has a 40% stake in the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) - which runs the country's lone power transmission line. It transmits electricity all the way from Luzon - the northern end of the country - down to Mindanao in the south.

On Tuesday, Senator Risa Hontiveros asked - given Chinese control of the NGCP - "Is it possible for our power grid to be taken down remotely?" ...(answer:)  "Given the technological advancement right now in the telecommunications as well as in software, that is possible," he said.

another problem: a lot of the technical manuals are written in Chinese (although this BBC article claims they have been translated).

many of the technicians back in 2015 were Chinese, but now we are assured that they have all left the country. 

what is going on right now is a lot of brownouts, so the politicians are busy blowviating that this is due to evil China. 

Except brownouts in May are normal, and may be getting worse, not beecause of evil China but because people are a lot richer than they were 20 years ago when I moved her. People are now more affluent and can buy airconditioners and the poor can afford electric fans and tvs and computers, and of course the population is growing. So there is a need for more electricity.

 And since 20 percent of our electricity is hydroelectric power, which means they can't produce as much electricity when the water level is low, such as now, the end of TagInit, the dry hot season from Feb to May,  before the monsoon starts in June.

But the backstory is that some politicians are seeing this as China sort of threatening the Philippines to stop them from helping Taiwan, and trying to intimidate the Philippines when we dare to defend our islands and fishermen in the West Philippine Sea as China becomes increasingly aggressive there.

and all of this is a minor footnote to the G7 meeting in Japan this week. 

Movie of the week

an old classic. Quick: watch it before the copyright cops find it is there.

cooking lesson for the week

Not all deaths are from fancy diseases: Malaria still kills

world Malaria Report.

how common is it? WHO reports:

Key facts In 2021, nearly half of the world's population was at risk of malaria. That year, there were an estimated 247 million cases of malaria worldwide. The estimated number of malaria deaths stood at 619 000 in 2021. The WHO African Region carries a disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden

there is a new vaccine that gives limited protection, and work is being done on controlling mosquitoes by releasing sterile mosquitoes or infecting them with a fungus that kills them.

But the older ways still work if done diligantly: draining mosquito breeding areas still work, as does spraying insecticide, insect repellant, covering up, and using mosquito nets.

that is why malaria is now rare in the Philippines.

WHO Reports:

Fifteen years ago, the Philippines reported 75 000 cases of malaria every year. No surprise, any talk back then of a Philippines free of malaria would have been thought fanciful. But now malaria has been delisted from the top ten leading causes of disease and death, and elimination of malaria is seen as a real possibility in the near future.. Indeed, the Philippines is a great example of how to successfully make progress to eliminate malaria – the subject of a new manual launched by WHO for World Malaria Day. Province by province the Philippines is being declared as malaria free and many more provinces have reached near-zero malaria cases. Overall, since 2005, malaria cases have dropped by 83% and malaria deaths by 92% in the Philippines.

 the main area where it still is endemic is the island of Palawan. The government aims to eliminate all Malaria by 2030. One wonders if spending a lot of money on covid might set back this goal, but so far that is still the plan.

 Village clinics or health workers that monitor for local breeding areas and diagnose and treat early cases can also help prevent the spread of the disease. 

 

The problem? 

There are several types of malaria, and the most virulent type, Falciparum malaria, is resistant to many antibiotics, and one of the scandals about counterfeit medicines is that they are often don't work, so people die of malaria, especially kids.

 Dr. Cambell often links to Andrew Wefwafwa's work in rural Uganda where he runs a clinic and a lot of preventive health services...Here he discusses his recent bout with malaria.

Been there, done that. albeit 30 years ago. Sigh.

weapons of the spirit

There seems to be a discussion about some guys trying to subdue a homeless man who was threatening people. A lot of people who didn't give a f//// about his welfare, and the city institutions that should have mandated jailing or treatment of the guy but didn't, are the loudest ones condemning this action.

One wonders how many of them are aware of the danger of using restraints, both physical or humans to restrain a violent person? Those who never worked with the mentally ill have no idea of how violent these people can be.

.It's sort of like a pacifist who I once had an email discussion with: Who said he would never violently harm anyone, even if he was being threatened. Fine, I said: But what if they were attacking your wife or daughter?

the terrible attacks against non violent missionaries when I worked in Africa was one reason that I stopped being a pacifist. 

there is a time of war, and a time of peace.

Yet there is an argument that using weapons of the spirit can overcome such evil because it could turn the heart of those attacking you. The problem of course is that this only works for those who have a spiritual grounding in prayer and tradgedy.

One film that I had in the USA, but didn't bring here with me (VHS different here), was Pierre Sauvage's film Weapons of the Spirit.

Alas even though this is PBS I cannot find it on line: maybe because it is being renastered for re release this year.

a short clip can be watched on Vimeo, and this is a 2 minute preview:

Although I can't find the video on line, the transcript can be found on Internet archives.

The point was the there were many individuals who risked their lives hiding the Jews, but that here it was an entire town who kept the secret, and even the Germans who were posted there to recover from wounds etc. knew what was going on but "saw nothing"...

What brought this us was a short clip from the latest Jodan Peterson discussion on the Exodus, where they discussed the dilemma of the midwives (Egyptian? Jewish?) who allowed the boys to live even though the law was to kill all male children.

Musical interlude of the day

Gain of function experiments? Evil Trump stopped them

 At least that is what this LATimes article says.

Uh, actually these experiments were stopped by President Obama and then given an ok to restart a week or two before Trump took over (and in the chaos I guess they figured this would be overlooked).

But now the LATIMES Business page  (not the science page?) insists:

Column: How Trump’s anti-science meddling erased 3 years of crucial COVID research...

yup. he stopped EcoHealth from funding gain of function research, something that a lot of scientists think developed the covid strain that killed a couple million people.

I discussed all of that in the past LINK but one does wonder at this part of the article:

Trump’s action magnified what already had become a targeted attack on EcoHealth and its president, Peter Daszak. Republicans and advocates of the theory that the COVID virus leaked from a Chinese lab have tried to depict them as villains of the pandemic.

hmm... Peter Daszak? Wasn't he the guy who in January 2020 got a lot of scientists together to write an article in Lancet saying covid was not from a lab leak?

The problem? He funded the Wuhan lab, so should not have been allowed to do this. 

Indeed: he has now been thrown off the Lancet panel still investigating the origin of covid.

Yahoo news :Jerry Dunleavy June 22, 2021· 

 Peter Daszak Zoologist, disease ecologist Peter Daszak, a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan Institute of Virology who steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding to the Chinese lab, has been recused from a COVID-19 origins investigation run by a commission organized under the auspices of the Lancet medical journal.

 italics mine. Recuse means removed because of a conflict of interest. 

 But hey, don't mention that in your article LATIMEs writer. If you do maybe your propaganda that Trumpieboy hated science might not be believed.

So the lies and coverup continue, but hey, what do you know peasants?

As I said in my earlier post: One arguement that covid originated in the wet market was believable because it was a mile or two away from the lab, and at least two strains of the virus were found there. 

Then Mosher's article in the NYTpost connected the dots by pointing out that some personnel were stealing and selling lab animals, and that explains the missing link of how the wuhan lab animals went to the wet market and spread the virus.

Conspiracy theory? Uh not if you are familiar with a culture of corruption. In the Philippines, double dead meat is a problem. so is stealing /diverting stuff by underpaid staff.

So why wouldn't scientists figure this out?  

Because they are scientists, not cops. 

Scientists ask a question and figure you are telling the truth so believe you. 

Cops however might dig a bit and find things being covered up. 

MIT technology Review shows how scientists examine the lab leak vs market theory: 

Drawing on myriad sources, including peer-reviewed papers, insights from epidemiologists who had access to first-hand information, and media reports, he tried to determine whether bias crept in when clinicians in Wuhan were trying to understand the viral outbreak.

What he found—not only that there was no obvious bias, but also that many of the first diagnosed cases of covid were either people who worked at the market or lived nearby—has settled his mind that the virus is unlikely to have emerged from a lab leak and that the market was the site of a spillover from animals.

A virologist would assume these people were truthful.

But what if they lied, or didn't want to tell about rumors about their friends on the staff diverting animals to be sold, or maybe just they were snobs who didn't notice the lower paid staff exist: You know, the ones who might be the ones most likely to divert sick animals because they are underpaid.

Corruption is behind counterfeit drugs that kill people, much of which comes from China or India.  UKGuardian article is from 2019 but is probably still valid.

as for Mosher: He was the one who spilled the beans on China's forced abortion policy, back in the 1980s when few westerners living with the elite in the big cities didn't notice this was going on.

Westerners simply do not understand that such things happen. 

The Tabloid the UK Mail discusses the problem of wild animals being sold in wet markets in China.

A study from researchers in China, the UK and Canada that went unpublished for more than a year has been posted online

It finds that more than 38 species of wild live animals were sold for food and as pets from the markets in Wuhan

Many of the animals were sold infected with diseases, including coronaviruses that originate in birds and in fowl

The findings may offer a clue in the origins of COVID-19 and whether it jumped from animals to humans or escaped from a lab

Researchers sent the study to a journal in February 2020 and was rejected, was rejected twice more and than sat in a WHO inbox for more than year

Italics mine.

So the problem was known: What was not known is where the animals came from.

Sceptics say yes they sell animals but no proof they were the covid ones, However they quote a few Chinese sources about the problem.

Animals 24 7 notes the monkey trade going on. This is not about covid, but gives one an idea on how corruption works.

The reason I posted the Professor Feynman videos in an earlier blog post was that the Space Shuttle investigation was all set to assert it was an accident that could not have been forseen, but Feynman, who was a regular mensch, not a big shot or a bureaucrat, actually went and talked to the lower staff and figured out the problem. And being a non bullshitter, dared to say this out loud.

I was going to say with more scientists like Feynman we wouldn't need to go to conspiracy sites to figure out the problem. 

But of course, one of the scandals of the Covid debacle is the censorship of experts who did not support the official story.

Joe Rogan, call your office. 

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

Update: Dr C has a short video on big shots questioning stuff (and the video has links to more information). And he does mention about good intentions leading to bad stuff happening.

then we have this report by an evil Republican.(/sarcasm).

Is the FBI so politicized that they are unreliable?

 Trumpieboy is pushing the stolen election stuff all over, and some polls suggest that this exaggeration is starting to be believed.

But drip by drip, information is leaking out that the federal government DID interfered on many levels against Trumpieboy: as shown in the Durham investigation.

MSNews

After 4-year probe, Durham report slams FBI for actions in 2016 Russia investigation

but don't worry. No one will be punished for this. 

Durham's final report examining the origins of the Russia investigation brings to a close a four-year probe that failed to produce any major convictions despite the expectations pushed by Trump and his allies.

Heh. Sounds like the Philippines, where politicians never quite get convicted of suspected crimes.

So what did the FBI do wrong? 

,,,"In particular, there was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump's political opponents. The Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them before opening a full-scale investigation."

 cops (and doctors) get a lot of fake information and you have to probe deeper to find the truth. But here, what happened was a failure to question if the information was true, and the investigation was full of inaccurate and illegal leaks to the press to blacken Trumpieboy's name.

Heck it was Trump. Everyone knows he is a lying manipulative SOB ("you're fired") who nevertheless gets things done...I am sure they could find stuff on him (or maybe not: he has good lawyers)... the real question is why did they rely on leaks that were unbelievable? 

But add to this the news about how the federal government controlled social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, whose rich owners donated to the Democrats only, and who allowed their apps to be manipulated to push their favorite candidate...and you have a major problem for ordinary folk who just to elect someone who can run things, and who rely on institutions to be honest.

One does expect lies and manipulation in politics. 

But as a doctor, I am horrified at how the social media (and the medical establishment) censored information on Covid (and individual doctors, not just nut cases but people who had credentials who should not have been censored). 

Science is a process, not a religion that cannot be questions... and now as a result of that manipulation we see a collapse of trust in the medical profession, big Pharm, and vaccines.

The Tuskegee experiment led to the Black community distrusting the medical establishment for 80 years.

The fallout from the Dengue vaccine fraud led to a lot of children here in the Philippines dying of preventable diseases because they didn't get their routine baby shots. and you see the problem. 

Well, now you have a worldwide distrust of covid vaccines that will spill over into distrust of vaccines for measles, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, etc that can cause thousands of deaths. 

But hey, don't listen to me. Yes, I am a registered Democrat, but I am also a middle aged Catholic lady who is prolife, and the Feds have decided we need to be listed as possible terrorist.

It's not just the radical trads who are upset at this: So are the Jesuits.

From the (Jesuit magazine) America:

Two former agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who went on to hold leadership roles in the church say a recently revealed and subsequently retracted memo characterizing Catholics with a devotion to the Traditional Latin Mass as possible domestic threats is a troubling example of the law enforcement agency not following its own guidelines.

“It’s one thing if a journalist writes this in an opinion piece,” Kathleen McChesney, a former head of F.B.I. field offices in Chicago and Portland, told America. “It’s another thing when it’s in a government document.” Ms. McChesney, who previously held the third-highest role in the F.B.I., described the memo as “a terrible analytical document” and “antithetical to F.B.I. professional practices and guidelines.”

Of course, Catholics can be so called terrorists: during the VietNam war, I attended a small religious meeting that was also attended by one of the Harrisburg 7, who had peacefully vandalized an office and destroyed draft records.

And no, I am not worried that the FBI will send someone to our rural Philippine town to arrest me for posting bad stuff. 

However, Someone reported me to blogger, who is now watching my blog and told me I have at least 7 blogposts, many over 10 years old, that don't pass the test for political correctness. 

No, blogger, that acronym means Moro Islamic Liberation Front, not Mothers ILF....

Don't waste the food says ChatGPT

AnnAlthouse has a discussion with AI about if people get upset when food is thrown at someone in a movie.

What I learned from this is that ChatGPT etc has no sense of humor.

has anyone seen this done in real life? I haven't. 

 But both ChatGPT and all the commenters left out this classic scene:

-----------

according to IMDB: 

The pie fight scene lasts four minutes and was shot in five days. It is the longest pie fight sequence in movie history. At first, the cast had fun filming the pie fight scene, but eventually the process grew wearisome and dangerous. Natalie Wood choked briefly on a pie which hit her open mouth. Jack Lemmon got knocked out a few times: "a pie hitting you in the face feels like a ton of cement". At the end of shooting the fight, when Blake Edwards called "Cut!" he was barraged with several hundred pies that members of the cast had hidden, waiting for that moment.

About 4,000 real pies were used in the pie fight scene, and the cast ate many of them during filming. However, during a weekend break in filming, the pies spoiled. The stink was so bad that the building required a thorough cleaning and large fans to blow out the sour air.

During the pie fight, the Great Leslie remains clean while everyone else is covered in pie. Tony Curtis was actually changing clothes several times, because he all too often got hit with pie during filming.

Mental Floss has a history of pie throwing.

According to Hopes&Fears

, the first known pie fight appeared in 1909’s Mr. Flip, in which an obnoxious general store manager gets his comeuppance in the form of a pie to the face. Though the film itself is forgettable, other filmmakers of the time were inspired by the pie throwing scene—a visual gag perfectly suited to the then-soundless medium. Almost instantly, the pie fight became a staple of silent films. Just like the police chase (made famous by the Keystone Kops), an epic pie fight was an easy way to end a film.

debunking experts

 

.....,,,,.....

family news

 Kuya is almost finished the harvest. So we now have money can can pay back some of what had to be borrowed from the government to harvest the last crop, with some money left over to prepare the fields for the main harvest once the monsoon starts.

 
We now have money so the roof is being repaired. With plastic wrap for now, which will work until the next signal 3 typhoon hits.

we replaced the koi in our small fountain three times, each time most of them died at ten days (usually a sign of new fishtank high nitrogen), but the last group survived. 

 But the fountain kept losing water, probably from a leak (due to settling) so they now decided to fix the fountain and removed the fish. '

I am a bit mad about it: the fish are a joy to watch, and keep the mosquito larvae down. So why didn't they fix it after the last group of koi died from the weather/typhoon/prolonged loss of electricity for the pump that keeps the fountain oxygenated? Because no money. The money for last year's major harvest was stolen by the rice dealer...

Joy is busy: She was on the radio for an interview on Friday about the latest education program for the young about how to run a small agribusiness and manage their small farms.

The gov't here pushes organic food, which is good. But this is labor intensive and more expensive than growing food with machinery and chemical fertilizer/herbicides. but there is a market for this because of the growing middle class, and they are seeking a way to export it to get a higher price.

The bad news is that the ecocrazies are now trying to stop everyone from growing rice because it is a major source of greenhouse gas,...

in other news: dog fights over the lady dog in heat, but not as severe last night because Barry, our large dog, won the fight. And we blocked the area in the garage where he was going out to seek love from the ugly dog (mange) down the street, so we only hear the neighbor's dogs fighting over her.

Dr. C keeps talking about excess deaths in the UK. we are having a lot of deaths here, but most are old people with heart, kidney, or lung disease.

Me, I am high risk: and my immune system must have been poor because I had complicated dengue and fatigue etc for six months afterward. Then I got shingles without a rash. So now a big shot Senator in the USA is shown coming back to work after a shingles attack. My sympathies lady, but I also noted you are cachexic so wonder what messed up your immune system. Lolo had shingles ten years before his leukemia showed up, and my aunt had severe shingles six years before her lymphoma showed up. Me, I figure dengue messed up my immune system. And no, anti vaxxers: I didn't get the Pfizer shot: I got the AZ shot which only kills with blood clots, and that was two years earlier.

Science below the fold

 The NIH is restoring funding to EcoHealth so they can fund bat virus reseach in the Wuhan lab.

Nature:

NIH reinstates grant for controversial coronavirus research

Researchers who spoke to Nature applaud the renewal, adding that this type of research is essential to avert the next pandemic. They claim that the NIH’s termination and subsequent suspension were politically motivated, and that, although long overdue, this renewal ends — for now — a drama-filled exchange between the agency and EcoHealth.

Yes it was just politics... 

but WTF? 

Scientists at Boston University have developed a form of coronavirus that killed 80 per cent of the mice they tested it on — reigniting the debate over the use of experimental lab research involving deadly pathogens. Amid the furore, the university hit back at “false and inaccurate” media coverage that “sensationalised” the research.....

a lot of the articles still assume that no, the virus didn't accidentally come from the Wuhan lab so there was no reason to stop such experiments. But they also ignore lab leaks and infections from these labs in the past.

As for Wuhan: One argument against the accidental release is that two variations of the virus spread from the wet market to people.

So how could a leak travel a mile from the lab to the market if it were a lab leak?

That was puzzling, until I read an article that some lab personnel were diverting lab animals to be sold (either live but infected, or dead, what we in the Philippines call double dead meat).

to tell you the truth, corruption is a problem in China to a degree that would shock the average Yank. But those of us familar with corruption that is common here in the Philippines just laugh at that rumor, because it is believable.

as for EcoHealth: Last Sept there was a report that Eco health wanted to build a lab here in the Philippines.

three projects currently being undertaken in the Philippines. This includes PREDICT, bat conservation and EIDR (Emerging Infectious Disease Repository). The PREDICT project seeks to “identify new emerging infectious diseases that could become a threat to human health” while EIDR seeks to “unravel the origins of Emerging Infectious Disease (EID) events.”

The PH Government should look into the extent of these projects in the Philippines, particularly EIDR, as it is funded both by the US DTRA and USAID, both agencies which have various program objectives other than purely scientific research.

Biolabs are important, both for human and animal health. They are needed to identify ordinary germs and then advise how to stop the spread, or maybe devise a a vaccine to stop the disease. (FMD, African swine flu, and bird flu to just name a few that are affecting the animals here in SEAsia, and other diseases that are a chronic danger, like Anthrax or brucellosis).

But the lies and coverup by China and the lies of the US experts to coverup that the US was funding this dangerous research ( because it was banned in the USA) have lowered the trust of ordinary people.

that is why conspiracy theories about the Ukraine biolabs is floating around, pushed by a Russia who has had it's own problems with lab leaks in the past.

But there is a fine line between investigating disease that could cause an epidemic, in order to stop it, and doing research for biowarfare. 

but the dirty little secret of biowarfare is blowback: You can't keep it from killing your own people.

That is why no one outside of really rabid conspiracy theorists think that Covid was a deliberate biowarfare attack by the Chinese government.

Finally, the decline of trust in the Public health establishment is a problem. We see it here after the Dengue vaccine debacle, where a few kids died from the vaccine given to the wrong kids, but the result was a mistrust that resulted in parents deciding against routine vaccines, and that resulted in hundreds dying of easily preventable diseases.

and we see it now, where a lot of folks are horrified that the same WHO types who stopped many epidemics (yellow fever and Ebola come to mind) have lost public trust because they seemed to lie to coverup the Wuhan virus. 

yet now we are reading that the WHO wants to tell all the world's governments that they need to obey the WHO policies. This would be needed for example if a new smallpox epidemic or black plague (or super flu) hit. But their credibility is now low, and so the usual suspects are seeing this as a power grab.

No I am not going to post a Tucker Carlson video about this: just read the article for his rant.

But thoughtful people are worrying about this too.

Here is Dr. C's video of a UK MP discussing the problem of the WHO's latest power grab;

Video of the week

 forget the raplike forgettable tunes of Hamilton.

Watch this and try not to dance.

...

Internet: Starlink now in the Philippines

 According to the Manila Bulletin, we now have the option for Starlink.

...this Sydney Australia news article (May 4 2023) explains:

The future of the internet depends on who controls the South China Sea

More than 486 undersea cables carry more than 99 per cent of all international internet traffic globally, according to the Washington-based research firm TeleGeography. The bulk of them are controlled by a handful of American technology giants, namely Google-owner Alphabet, Facebook-owner Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

South-East Asia’s internet economy is expected to reach $1 trillion in value by 2030. Whoever controls the Asia-Pacific’s subsea cabling infrastructure will not only dominate this booming economy, but control the global internet. ... As such, the world’s subsea cabling infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable not only to sabotage but also to espionage – spy agencies can easily tap into cables on their own territory.

That’s why geopolitical rivalry between the US and China has increasingly focused on controlling the world’s subsea cabling networks.

and this is the backstory of why China is trying to figure out how to destroy the starlink satellites. 

Grescham's law: Synodality pushes out good Christians

A lot of folks watched when the Anglican bishop crowned King Charles III.

But while he was busy strutting his stuff, did the press notice that his policies are chasing many believers from the church (not including of course those who just see the church believes in nothing, so why bother to pay attention to it) 

GetReligion quotes the Anglican bishops of Africa correcting the oh so very politically correct head of the British Anglican church, saying 

“We have no confidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the other Instruments of Communion led by him … are able to provide a godly way forward that will be acceptable to those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency and authority of Scripture," warned the Global Anglican Future Conference, which met April 17-21 in Kigali, Rwanda. GAFCON IV drew 1,302 delegates from 52 nations, including 315 bishops.

Welby will try to finagle around charges of heresy, and rejecting the ten commandments in favor of the latest perversion pushed by the twittermob trendy mentality... this is nothing new in the Anglican church.

But the important part of this is the statement:

(Leaders who) are able to provide a godly way forward that will be acceptable to those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency and authority of Scripture.

For Catholics, we would say: acceptable to those commited to the truth and the beliefs of tradition for about 2000 years (3200 years, if you include the ten commandments).

Grescham's law states that bad money drives out good. Meaning that if you debase the coinage, the good money will be diverted (hoarded or melted down but not used in circulation).

This is an observation of why a lot of Catholics are leaving the trendier than thou churches for churches that actually believe in God.

I mean, doing social work etc is fine: But you have to start with personal reform. And stressing social work as the only way to be a Catholic ignores the people whose holiness is found in the deeds of ordinary life: being faithful to one's spouse, caring for children, praying for each other, etc. 

The so called little way of St Therese, where you do ordinary things with love as a prayer. Because it is easy to go out and feel self righteous demonstrating for the cause of the day: It's a bit harder to change the diaper of your kid in the middle of the night, or clean up the garbage left behind after the riots.

So now the big thing for Catholics is the synod on synodality, (what ever that means). But what it seems to mean is to get the well organized and well funded Catholic left take over these meetings, while ordinary Catholics who have a life and have stopped being active in "parish work" run by these types, already know their concerns are not welcome.

They can use fake meetings with prechosen outsiders who don't want to follow Christ but want to change the church (read hijack the church institututions) all they want to, pretending they are "welcoming" outsiders (read those who have a political agenda to take over and change the church) but in reality they are driving out "those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency and authority of scripture (and tradition).""

Those bent on reforming (deforming some might say) the Catholic church figure that Catholics will just obey, and if they don't, they will be sidelined and told it is wrong to criticize the pope (tell that to Catherine of Sienna or St Athanasius).

But this movement in the Anglican church is a warning to the Vatican that believers are being sidelined by the StGallen mafia takeover of the Vatican to reform it (read destroy dogma, moral rules, and belief in God) will simply stay quiet, or maybe even leave the church.

 Because these synodality meeting are about hearing the objections of people who don't like to hear that hard stuff about not boinking your neighbor's wife, or not killing your unborn child, or in places like the Philippines, reminding people not to take drugs, or take bribes, or steal money meant to be used for public works.

Such things are not acceptable to those who see the church's mission is to provide a godly way forward that will be acceptable to those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency and authority of Scripture  the traditions of the Christian church for two thousand years

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

update: One reason that the Pope hasn't been thrown out is one: He says stuff the MSM/ NWO and the so called reformers like, and Two: He does say stuff that is in line with Catholic dogma, although often what is reported is distorted, so a lot of people give him the benefit of the doubt.

So he says A and it's correct. But then he informally says B and lets heretical bishops push B without correcting them, confusing the ordinary Catholic. 

Here is an example: Most secular reports on the Pope's visit to Hungary seem to be about letting in Muslim refugees, and not much else. 

But this report by Hungary's ambassador to the Vatican, points out that the Pope actully praised Hungary for their help with the huge number of Ukrainian refugees. 

And he also notes that Pope Francis gave a strong condemnation of transgender agenda, something that resulted in the is silencing all and sundry in the US and Europe.  

But give it time, and he will say something like "who am I to judge" (which was a comment about a pederast), and the press will shout it from the rooftops that the church will change it's rules.

Save the CInema: Film review

Every once in awhile, one runs across a film about ordinary people just trying to make their small part of the world better.

This is the story of Save the Cinema, where a hairdresser who with the help of some friends saves a cinema from being destroyed in the name of progress.

the preview really doesn't give you an idea of the charm and humor of the film.

the people in it are seen as trying their best to keep the cinema open, because art is important. And it shows how a community can be reminded that their history and heritage might be more important than development to become modern.

So enjoy.

I give it a four out of four stars.

Musical interlude of the day

....

Chinese threats escalating

China is slowly moving to threaten war.

...#PRC: Detaining foreign nationals is the business plan Stephen Yates, chair of the America First Policy Institute's China Policy Initiative. @GordonGChang, Gatestone, Newsweek, The Hill....

the discussion mentions this could be a prelog to conflict.

UKGuardian article on this:

The Reuters analysis of records on exit bans, from China’s supreme court database, shows an eightfold increase in cases mentioning bans between 2016 and 2022. China last week beefed up its counter-espionage law, allowing exit bans to be imposed on anyone, Chinese or foreign, who is under investigation.

But you know, it's not just against Chinese businessmen and international business community: there are a lot of Filippine OFW there:

Wikipedia says only 12000 in mainland China, but a lot of OFW are caregivers, nannies, nurses and blue collar workers in Taiwan and Hong Kong (and Macau).

Wikipedia:

Hong Kong	165,000
Taiwan	147,234

So now China is hinting they could be used as pawns if the Philippines doesn't obey them.

CNN PHIL headline:

Solon condemns China’s ‘threat’ vs. OFWs in Taiwan,,

“The Philippines is advised to unequivocally oppose ‘Taiwan independence’ rather than stoking the fire by offering the US access to the military bases near the Taiwan Strait if you care genuinely about the 150,000 OFWs,” Xilian said.

The background of this is a ten year slow war against the Philippines in their territorial claims to the West Philippine sea,

President Obama encouraged then President Aquino not to aggressively stop them when they started chasing out fishermen and digging up the seabed to build artificial islands: Instead the US told him to take it to court, where the Philippines won the case, but no one was around to enforce this decree by international law.

So the next time you read the MSM spin about this is the evil USA starting a confrontation against China, just remember that China has been pushing around the Philippines and VietNam in this area for over a decade, and their artificial islands have reached the point that they could threaten vital sea lanes.

After years of Duerte, who saw the US wasn't helping, and tried to make nice with China (and who hated the CIA ...long story) he found that China was screwing him with fake promises. So now that we have a new president Bong Bong Marcos, the alliance was reset, and now there is an agreement that the US will be posting troops into northern Luzon (see video in previous blogpost).

The US/Philippine alliance is a delicate matter, because the Philippines doesn't like being told what to do by their former colonial masters. However, the hatred of the Chinese is centuries old. ,,,in SEAsia, it is the Chinese who essentially run the economy (most entrepeneurs are part Chinese ancestry) and so a lot of Filipinos who can't get ahead in business blame them for the elite families monopoly of the economic sector. 

But the present crisis is that the Biden administration has finally decided that hey maybe they need to stop China before they invade Taiwan (and later, Luzon and VietNam and Siberia?)

Hence US troops are now being allowed to reside on Philppine military bases 

And China is also continuing their threats in the West Philippine sea: and this ten year old slow war in open sight is now being written about in the MSM.

From the Inquirer:
 

Aggression in West PH Sea: China’s maritime ‘Great Wall’ plan

well, duh. anyone with a map of sea lanes know that their artificial islands could block major shipping routes from the Indian Ocean into the Pacific.

And now they are trying to expand their control from passively building artificial islands in the shallow shoals to actually being aggressive. They use huge numbers of what they claim are fishing boats, but are actually part of their naval militia

but hey if you attack them (or they sink your fishing boat "accidentally" well, you can't blame the Chinese government>.............

Read the above Inquirer article that has maps of how they could use their militarized islands not only for naval operations but for bombing small countries nearby. And don't forget the internet cables, which if cut threaten not just the Philippines and SEAsia but India.

....

an additional complication: lots of military aged Chinese men working in the local casinos, (wikipedia estimates 100 thousand and adds:

Filipino security officials have raised concerns regarding Chinese-affiliated POGOs in the Philippines, particularly those near police and military installations. Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana has said that POGOs could be used in espionage activities.