The reference is to Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy.
Well, anyway, I did post about it on my medical blog here LINK
and it seems to be mild,
So it could kill or make high risk elders like myself very sick, but the ordinary folk will just get mildly ill and should be okay.
And I had the AZ (adenovirus) shot, so this part won't affect me:
and don't panic: President Biden is ordering a new vaccine for y'all.
and although having a new vaccine sounds nice, there is now question about the mRNA vaccine lowering your immunity to a different strain.
There are questions if the mRNA vaccines might make you more prone to get sick because of subtle immune system changes.
That part about the immunology from the mRNA vaccine that might mean your risk of getting covid is higher is a bit technical and is over my head, but the discussion on the imunology behind this problem is discussed on Science magazine here.
and Dr. Campbell discusses the immune problem here
All of this is sort of above my head since these discoveries on how the immune system works was not known when I studied medicine 50 years ago.
but the cynics are there already memeing the new varient.
a famous Irish lament is about saying goodbye to a loved one, knowing that maybe you might never see him again.
but the actual history of the song is a bit more complicated: like a lot of songs that have their roots in tradition, it sort of evolved to the present version:
A lot of us remember that it was the theme song for the Danny Thomas Show, aka Make Room for Daddy, a 1950s sit com.
the irony? Danny Thomas was not Irish, but an Arab: A Catholic Lebanese American.
But for doctors and parents of children suffering from cancer, his best known role was as the one who was behind St Jude's Children's hospital.
As a "starving actor", Thomas had made a vow: If he found success, he would open a shrine dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of hopeless causes. After becoming a successful actor in the early 1950s...to help raise funds to build St. Jude Children's Research Hospital....With help from Dr. Lemuel Diggs and close friend Anthony Abraham, an auto magnate in Miami, Florida, Thomas founded the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1962.
Why Memphis? His original idea was to put the hospital in California where he worked, but doctors pointed out the lack of such hospitals in the rural South of the USA...
A lot of us are old enough to remember when childhood leukemia was a death sentence. And then a breakthrough occured: a miracle.
Smithsonian magazine has the story of the hospital and one of the men behind the breakthrough: Don Pinkel.
Pinkel recruited the staff. He devised the protocols. He forged the relationships. He coaxed the drugs from the pharmaceutical companies. He wheedled the grant monies from the federal agencies. In its first years, he kept St. Jude afloat, though it had few success stories and sometimes could barely make payroll. “Don had a clear and noble vision,” said Simone, “and he created a culture of daring.”
Perhaps most important, it was Pinkel who decided, from the outset, to put the conquest of ALL(Leukemia) at the heart of the enterprise.
Said Simone, “Don’s the one who realized: It doesn’t do any good to extend the lives of those kids by a few months. You have to go for broke. You have to go for the total cure.”
And he did. In 1970, just eight years into his tenure at St. Jude, Pinkel was able to make an extraordinary pronouncement: Childhood leukemia, he said, “can no longer be considered an incurable disease.”
Read the whole article (and don't forget to have a handkerchief handy).
no, not a neocon exercize: China has been stealing the shoals in the West Phiiippine sea for over a decade, and they are now facing a president here that might not try to make nice and compromise because China didn't keep any of their promises.
However, the big news here is the start of the school year,
and a typhoon up north that is bringing rain showers and flood dangers.
Here is StrategyPage discussing some of the issues.
Like in WWII, the Philippine is in the way of the fights between world powers.
I already posted about the aggression of China against the Philippine Coast Guard, but this has been going on for years: First China tribed to bribe our lovely president in the ZTE scandal to take over the resources there, and then under another president, they started chasing the fishermen, surrounding the shoals and then destroying the ecosystem by digging up and building artificial islands, which whty have since militarized.
sigh
This is not just about the Philippines: their takeover threatens the sea routes from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific
China is not the only one who is playing cold war games in the western Pacific:
A detachment of Russia’s navy warships returned from more than three weeks of joint-patrolling of the Pacific Ocean with Chinese navy ships, the Russian Interfax news agency reported on Sunday. | @Reutershttps://t.co/eiJjRKfSCO
During the patrol, the Russian-Chinese detachment passed along the Kuril ridge, the agency reported.
The islands, off the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, are known in Russia as the Kurils and in Japan as the Northern Territories and have been at the core of decades of tension between the neighbors.
The Russian-Chinese warships also circled part of the Aleutian Islands archipelago. Most of the Aleutian Islands belong to the U.S. state of Alaska, but the Commander Islands near the Kamchatka Peninsula are part of Russia.
U.S., Japan and Australia plan joint navy drills in disputed South China Sea, Philippine officials say
it is a response to the increased Chinese aggression in the West Philippine sea. Earlier aggression in the area was ignred: in the past, China had their civilian proxies block the Philippine ships going to their small outpost, and last month they shot lasers at the supply ships (which could blind those on board). But of course, both incidents could be written off because China would say it was an accident. But using a water cannon weapon is close to the line of an act of war, because it could have sunk the ships, and there is no way it could be blamed on an accident.
this is not just about stealing the fishing and natural gas resources of the Philippines and being able to block the sealanes and internet cables: this is about Taiwan, of course. Frightening the Philippines not to cooperate with the Yanks is the aim.
It might not work.
Duterte had a feud with the US because of CIA shennanigans when he was mayor in Davao, and the CIA did their best to demonize him via manipulating the press to paint him as terrible, but the end result was to push him into getting needed help from China and Russia.
But even Duterte was not China's lackey, and didn't give them the west Philippine sea, especially after their promises to fight drugs etc went sour.
But Marcos has a different history. His father was supported for years by the USA, and although the US told him to leave when there was a peaceful uprising after he tried to steal the election, Marcos father was allowed to just move to Hawaii and not jailed
Marcos the son is persuing pro American policies, and although most of the Chinese take over in the West Philippine sea was done under PNoy and Duterte, he is now not letting China take over.
I am waiting for the left to start protesting this, but even the left here is anti China more than anti America.
In the meanwhile, the economy seems to be booming at least in our area.
Building all over, including new shops and businesses.
and Kuya reports he is negotiating with the firm that is putting a lot of solar panels in our area.
Most of our rice fields are too productive to sell or lease (although with the high price of fertilizer and diesel for farm equipment, our profit margin has gone down).
But he has some land on slightly higher ground that needs irrigation even in the rainy season (which costs money) so he is negotiating with them to let them use the land for solar panels.
By the way, this explains why the farmers there were visited by thugs saying someone wants to buy the land, and the farmers refused to tell them where we lived. (meaning they were not local thug: everyone here knows us).
I won't have time to watch them all, but the yearly Book festival is going on in the Library of Congress, and it has a lot of interesting lectures there about recent books.
Human rights: Uighar and forced to work in the USA:
and this one is about modern medicine: and cancer treatment
how about horror books?
Lots of discussion with best selling authors...
Most of the lectures are on cutting edge topics in fiction and non fiction (e.g. history).
Right now I am reading the Tale of Genji: and it got me interested in medieval Japan.
Aside from seducing lovely ladies, and playing music at parties there is not a lot of discussion about the food they ate.
one thing I noticed: they didn't live very long, making me wonder why (discussed here). Yup. Low protein diet so unable to fight off TB and other infectious disease was my take too.
Now, if you read about the history of infectious disease, the introduction of tea helped increase the life span in Europe, and I seem to recall a lecture that mentioned a similar decrease in certain diseases in Japan in the 1300 or later and again attributed it to the spread of tea drinking.
Is it the medicinal value of the tea itself, or is it because you have to boil water to make it, and of course boiling water kills germs.
One thing modern folks forget is that drinking water was deadly because contaminated water spread diarrhea, cholera, typhoid, etc. This is why Paul warned Timothy to add a little wine to his water "for his stomach's sake", and it's why wine and beer were the beverages of choice in ancient and medieval days (although the wine was usually mixed with water, and the beer was often low alcohol beer).
I didn't run across a lot of tea drinking in the Tale of Genji, so I started checking on line for articles about food customs. Because of Buddhist beliefs, meat was supposed to be shunned, but the Wikipedia article notes that in the Heian period, the nobility did eat meat and seafood...
But there is no mention of what they drank.
Then I ran across a book about how Tea was introduced into that country
A Bowl for a Coin is the history of tea cultivation and drinking in Japan.
Originally introduced by Buddhist monks via China, but it was originally only for meditation or for medicine, but gradually the farmers learned to roast it (and later steam the leaves) so they would not be so bitter. And gradually drinking this brew spread from the nobility to ordinary people.
So anyway, Kuya was wondering if we could grow tea here. Presumably we could, so it made me look into tea growing etc.
a Wikihow article on tea leaf growing and processing the tea is found HERE.
most of the how to grow tea videos are wide eyed new agey ladies who don't look as if they ever had to make a living running a farm instead of a small garden, but here is a good old boy instructing you on how to grow and process your own tea.
What is interesting is how he instructs several ways on how to process the tea leaves, and it sounded vaguely familiar: because it is similar to how the medieval farmers in Japan processed tea.
the CIA/Crack connection like most of the other conspiracy theories has a small basis of truth (to get information they work with the bad guys and some of them get corrupted)
But drugs are actually a world wide problem.
so there is a real dilemma in what to do to fight the drug war without hurting the feelings of those who are SJW promoting human rights.
But one does have to wonder why there was an over the top hysteria against Duterte's drug war, because what is rarely noticed by such human rights types is that the murder rate only went up a small amount but the crime rate went way down.
And one does wonder why these human rights folks never noted the many deaths from drugs: deaths of druggies (overdose or family violence) or of innocent people killed by druggies in robberies etc. who were not counted in the statistics (three incidents in our neighborhood alone).
Here drugs continue to be a problem, but crime remains lower: it is still safe for me to go out (so far). In the past, kidnapping was a real danger, as was robbery. (not just purse snatching but home invasions with violence to those in the home).
We had kidnap gangs in the area in the past: The security guards at the bank would always laugh when I would go there with the cook, who is 75 and weighs 90 pounds, because I told them (with a wink) that she was my security guard. They thought that was funny, but the truth is that she has connections with all the local tricycle drivers in town, and knows everyone in the area, including most of the NPA of course, so yes she protected me.
Here, every shop has security guards. And sometimes they shoot people, or are shot protecting businesses and politicians, alas. We do have cops of course, but the security guards are more for prevention: a warning to the bad guys not to mess with that business.
well, anyway, this is an old 2016 Reuters article about the elephant in the living room that few reports on Duterte's drug war mention: Chinese gangsters.
Of 77 foreign nationals arrested for meth-related drug offenses between January 2015 and mid-August 2016, nearly two-thirds were Chinese and almost a quarter were Taiwanese or Hong Kong residents, according to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).
Known in the trade as “cooks” and “chemists,” meth production experts are flown into the Philippines from Greater China by drug syndicates to work at labs like the one at Mount Arayat.
China isn’t only a source of meth expertise – it is also the biggest source of the meth and of the precursor chemicals used to produce the synthetic drug that are being smuggled into the Philippines, according to local drug enforcement officials.
If this sounds familiar, it is because it is similar to how Chinese gangsters are working with the Mexican cartels to bring fentanyl etc. into the USA.
Before Duterte started his drug war, there was a real danger that the Philippines could have become a narco state. We have OFW going to and from the country to all over the world, and many are poor so would become mules to move the drugs.
and of course, corruption is rampant in both the Philippines and in China.
read the article and you might find some parallels to what China is doing with the Fentanyl to the USA.
and the reason I brought this up?
Because China has been going all over the world investing in poor countries (often to steal their resources while helping them. Yes, I know: Europe did this during colonial times too.)
StrategyPage notes that along with Chinese investments come Chinese gangs and criminals.
August 24, 2023: As more Chinese companies invest in LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean) countries, there is an increased need for Chinese security firms to deal with local threats from local organized crime gangs as well as general lawlessness. When there are a lot of Chinese businesses in an area, that usually means Chinese gangsters are not far behind... This is a problem for the Chinese firms and for local police. The locals often can’t tell the difference between Chinese businessmen and Chinese gangsters and adopt an anti-Chinese attitude that makes trouble for all Chinese in the area. Chinese firms came up with a solution; Chinese PSCs, or Private Security Companies.
There are a lot of these private security groups: think of them as the Chinese version of Blackwater or the Russian Wagner group.
sigh
Actually this is the new normal, and I don't blame China for trying to protect their people.
I am ambivalent about Chinese investments because I am aware of how Europe looted third world countries for years while also developing them into modern countries.
But now with all the green agenda in western aid projects (not to mention that the green agenda has infiltrated some western charities and NGOs) that doesn't want to change the lifestyle of all those nice people who seem happy living in dire poverty a low carbon lifestyle...and of course western government aid programs have string attached: to get it you have to implement the western amoral sexual agenda human rights).
So yes, one might be sympathetic to Chinese investment that sees promoting "human rights" and preventing pollution etc. as a lesser important than promoting projects that will lessen poverty and starvation...
I am posting this because too often the complexities of crime and criminal enterprises is seen as merely a western problem, and the conspiracy types don't see this as a world wide problem.
China used a water cannon to stop a supply ship within the Philippine economic zone, and someone caught it on a video, meaning they couldn't get away with lies and diplomatic pressure that pretends an area 197 miles off of Palawan is not part of the Philippines territory (EEZ is 200 miles).
So now they have changed their tactics. Why? They got caught on a video camera and the confrontation was put on the internet for all to see.
The Philippine Coast Guard said China is now concerned about the “optics” of its actions, which is why it has shown a less aggressive response in the latest resupply mission for BRP Sierra Madre. | @JEMendozaINQhttps://t.co/65xCJtjIwE
oh heavens. They aren't worried that they committed an act of war against the Philippine Coast Guard in an area that is legally Philippine territory. They are only worried about the optics of the film that recorded their aggression.
“I think this has something to do with optics — they want to show the world na kunwari (that it may seem) they are not really that aggressive in preventing our resupply operations,” Tarriela said in a public briefing.
The official attributed this to PCG’s “approach of being transparent and publicizing the aggressive behavior of China on the previous resupply.”
Presumably the next thing that will happen is an internet or cellphone problem so that those wiley internet savvy Filipinos can't film and transmit the next incident of open aggression against a smaller nation.
Hmmm... I wonder if the PCG has access to Starlink....
Many years ago, in the chaos of the 1960s rejection of normality, I read the praise of the modern way to see the world, The Aquarian conspiracy that saw people channeling their own thing and then networking to make utopia. Ebook here.
a lot of what she wrote about has since then come true, but maybe those inside this revolution are too close to it to see what I saw as a problem: It is about self actualization. But there is no place in it for children, babies, caring for the sick and elderly because sacrificing your own wants for the family or spouse, etc, is not part of the Aquarian ideals...Indeed, there was no place in their utopia for the weak or inferior.
What stood in the way in the USA were the churches.
Hence the infiltration of Vatican II, and now the struggle of the Catholics against an anti pope who talks a lot about nice charitable stuff that I agree with, but if you look closer, appoints minions whose goal is the opposite... His agenda spouts charity work, but it is tone deaf to Jesus. I mean, he tells people to follow the green religion and help the poor but ignores that this means the poor are outliers, sort of pets for the strong to dabble with so they feel virtuous, and alas too often destroy when they put their green agenda in front of stuff like growing cheap food because that requires fossil fuel. And there is nothing in it about serving God in the humble everyday tasks of life.
Oh well, I have ranted about this before.
The second thing that has to be destroyed to promote a utopian societyis the family.
Judism, and it's daughters Christianity and Islam, have always defended the strong family, and to do so insisted on limiting sex outside of the family and puts crimps into women who seek to do their own thing free of family ties.
the limitation of both men and women's outside goals is part and parcel of a stable family life: nor is this just a western idea: Confucius, confronted with chaos and societal breakdown wrote strict rules to follow to reestablish the family.
well, anyway, the Trojan horse to destroy the family is gay marriage. Too often, we only read the theological objections that seem to be out of touch with out touchy feely generation: Love is love isn't it, and so let them marry.
Except apparently no one has looked at the deep roots behind that agenda.
Real Clear Investigations has an expose on gay theology in the major theology schools that apparently has gone on for thirty years without a lot of publicity.
read it and weep.
and two podcasts from First Things magazine discuss these changes.
Tolorating the third sex is not the same as pushing the gay agenda: we manage to do this here in the Philippines, where baclas and tomboys and third sex are accepted as part of our extended family: not approval of their behavior or letting the radical agenda to destroy the family (despite the US State Dept pressure to do so by pushing laws on gay rights, abortion and divorce) but acceptance as part of our family.
But one only has to read the dissadents who the present anti Pope is letting run things behind his nice rhetoric to see their agenda is to change church dogma to push this PC agenda.
We need inclusion they cry. (i.e. everyone except Catholics believing what the church taught until Francis took over are welcome).
One sees this in his latest stunt, aka the synod on synodality, which is being touted as including lay people and women, but if you look closely, most of these outsiders have an identical agenda. so the meeting is not about an honest discussion, but will merely be a way to rubber stamp the already chosen agenda of the so called reformers.
Steven Mosher interviews Dr. Thomas Ward, president of the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family, who warns that the upcoming Synod on Synodality could lead to a 'radical paradigm shift on Catholic morality on life and the family.'...
Dr. Ward himself, along with a number of other outspokenly pro-life members of the PAV, was asked to leave the Academy by the incoming Archbishop Paglia, who has since taken the Academy in, it is fair to say, a very different direction than JPII intended.
read the whole interview: An excerpt:
Steven Mosher: Dr. Ward, as the President of the JPII Academy for Human Life and Family, how do you and other members of the Academy view the upcoming Synod on Synodality, which will be held in Rome from October 4 to 29?
Dr. Thomas Ward: I and many other members of our Academy are deeply concerned that the Synod on Synodality will be used to affect a radical paradigm shift on Catholic morality on life and the family.
Steven Mosher: That’s a bold claim that will shock many. Can you substantiate it?
Dr. Ward: Yes, I can. Let me quote the words of senior churchmen who are openly working for this radical paradigm shift in Catholic morality, starting with Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, whom Pope Francis appointed to head the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV). In the words of Archbishop Paglia, the role of PAV is
to accept the invitation contained in paragraph 3 of his Apostolic Constitution Veritatis Gaudium (the Apostolic Constitution on Ecclesiastical Universities and Faculties) for a radical paradigm shift in theological reflection.
… to render a service to the Magisterium by opening up a space for dialogue that makes research possible and encourages it.
Steven Mosher: So that striking phrase, “radical paradigm shift,” comes from Francis himself.
Dr. Ward: A paradigm is a conceptual framework. Paradigm shifts in science arise when the dominant paradigm is thrown into crisis by new information. The result is that the previous paradigm is replaced by a new conceptual framework or system of beliefs. But bear in mind that in this case the “paradigm” in question is our system of Catholic beliefs.
The bad news that no one wants to talk about: The studies to prove it are expensive and the drug is generic, so there is no profit in it. So no drug company wants to spend a million dollars to prove it works and do all the paper work, because they will never get their investment back.
link2:poor water solubility means that oral ivermectin might not give a high enough dosage.
And we found it worked for mange in dogs: we treated a neighbor's ugly dog who was thrown out of the house because of mange, and she is now improved...
in Oklahoma, (and Texas) even the poor had airconditioners so having a day of 100 plus degrees is not a big thing.
So is the present heat wave new? Or is the news being manipulated because of the way they measure the temperature at ground level, not five feet in the air and away from buildings and cement as it was done until recent years?
The History guy has this report of a heat wave that has been forgotten:
and along with the heat, there is always a danger of fires: Mainly from lightning. I lived in New Mexico when half the state was on fire, and we had one near us that luckily (thanks to local fire fighters) didn't destroy our town. But the one in the northern part of the state destroyed part of Los Alamos and got most of the publicity.
Sort of like this fire, which few know about because it happened the same week of the great Chicago fire.
then we have the haze from the Canadian fires.
yes that has happened before:
then you have this. Yup he blames the drought:
just ignore what really caused the fire
sigh.
If you let the undergrowth grow unchecked, then the chance of catastrophic forest fires is worse. But if you burn it, you risk such secondary fires.
As for grass fires: they can go fast. So when I had bought a plot to build a house, I was told I had to irrigate it because dry grass was a fire hazard, but fresh green grass would lessen the risk of fires. But since unchecked growth would include weeds etc. that could spread seeds to the nearby farms...I was told I had to graze animals there to keep the grass and bad weeds down. So I bought some goats and a calf to do this.
Several movies show grass fires as part of the plot: This one in Return to Lonesome Dove shows how fast they can spread and destroy houses, crops, etc. Fast forward to 1:24,
Luckily now I live in the Philippines, where forest fires might happen in the mountains, but here in the plains our main danger is earhquakes, volcanoes, typhoons, floods and Dengue Fever.
Yesterday was the feast day of the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe, who ended up in Auschwitz because his Catholic newspaper/magazine opposed the Nazis.
He is considered a martyr, not for his politics, but because when the Nazis decided to punish prisoners for an escapee from the concentration camp, by starving ten men to death, he volunteered to take the place of one of them, a married man with children.
Since Nazis hated priests more than Jews or political dissadents, they let him do this.
So a real peson.
But the irony is that the story of his death is not just a shiny Catholic one dimensional story: because his story is echoed in several literary works.
He was one of the inspirations behind the fictional priest in the play the Deputy, who questions the silence of the Pope at a time when Jews and other innocoent people are being massacred by the Nazis. The background is that this is the source of many who condemn Pope Pius XII, which is not a surprise since it was essentially written as a broad side by a communist against a Pope who had of course opposed the Nazis but often quietly but was also a leading critic of the communists at a time when the left was silent against Stalin's terror state.
But it is a real question for us is: Do you openly condemn the powerful tyrant, seeing yourself as a proud hero in your own eyes, but leading to the massacre of not just yourself but a lot of innocent people, or do you quiestly try to save as many innocent people as possible?
So Father Kolbe is remembered to remind folk that the Nazis murdered 3000 priests in their concentration camps.
And because of this, he is a character in several Japanese stories by Nobel prize winner Shasuku Endo: especially in two the the short story collection LINK
Endo was a Catholic, baptised as a child, but he also has Catholicism and religion and the question of suffering is the theme in many of his novels.
BenedictineInstitute has an essay about Kolbe and Nagasaki as seen in one of Endo's stories:
The noted Catholic novelist Shūsaku Endō modeled the character Mouse in his 1963 short story “Fuda-no-Tsuji” in part on Fr. Kolbe. Like many of Endō’s short stories, it flits between the present and the past: both Tokyo of the 1930s and of the Edo period when thousands of Catholics were martyred in Japan .... The protagonist Inoue knew Mouse as a German monk (Kolbe’s surname was German) who worked at his university, but he clearly had little respect for the weakling. Decades later, at a reunion with his classmates, he finds out that Mouse had been put in a concentration camp where he offered himself in place of a condemned prisoner and was starved to death. Endo’s Inoue reflects: “and if, in fact, Mouse had died for a friend—for love—then that was not a tale from the long-gone days of the Edo period, but an incident that commanded a place in the man’s own heart.”....
You might be more familar with Endo's works from this movie.
Here is a discussion by Martin Scorsese about the film:
The book and film Silence is not just about faith, but about forgiveness and trying to do the right thing. Would you die for your faith? Ah, but would you deny your faith in order to save the lives of others? And if so, would God forgive you for this horrific sin?
Endo's stories often have the theme not just of questioning where God is in suffering, but about can your sin be forgiven? Is God the wrathful king or is he like Buddha, kind and forgiving, and a compassionate father welcoming the prodigal son?
there is a lot of crappy superficial stuff out there about religion in the PC world of western culture. Being fundamentalist means you never have to say you doubt, not just with Christians or Muslims but fundamentalism of the new atheists.
but in Catholicism, doubt and questioning and being in a dark night of the soul is considered part of one's life journey to holiness (or the opposite: such things lead many to an atheism that is not so much denial of God but telling God you are so mad at him you refuse to believe in him to punish him: so there!).
Too often people of faith are shown in films/tv etc in the west as cultists with wide staring eyes that don't blink, rather than as human beings.
But the humans I know who were killed (for serving the poor in an African civil war) were not wide eyed cultists but people who chose to continue their work despite the danger.
and that decision was made, not from a fanatic type faith but in a humble decision that was renewed every day to continue the work of caring for the sick and running schools despite the danger because that was their duty in life, that was how they served God.
WUHAN and the Ecohealth alliance funding is discussed at 33:45 minutes.
and then they discuss how it's impossible to track the second tier money, meaning maybe Wuhan is still being funded
A lot more stuff out there for those against wasting your tax money for nonsense and back scratching projects
but that part about Ecohealth: They are still getting funded, because I ran into this grant from the Dept of Defense so they could build a lab in the Philippines: to look for bat viruses? I can't find anything recently if this is was approved by the Senate here.
more about ecohealth funding here LINK in 2023 it shows the Philippines got 2.9 million dollars
Why did it take three YEARS to halt funding to Wuhan?
Trump said he'd seen evidence COVID leaked from lab in April 2020 and FBI thinks a research accident is 'likely' - yet taxpayer dollars were STILL being sent until this week
The Health Department said on Monday that immediate action was needed to 'protect the public interest'
Critics suggest the White House's hesitation to scrap all funding is because of the US Government's eerie ties
Dr. C is on a roll, and it is just a matter of time until he is again banished from Youtube etc. for telling the truth to power.
After being a firm supporter of vaccines and shutdowns, he is now upset at the lies behind these things and has been busy using his Youtube channel to point this out and criticize the collapse of truth in the experts and in medical journals.
However, he now has another lie he is trying to expose: How Canada is pushing killing of the sick and the mentally ill, and no one seems to be upset about it.
nor does anyone seem to be upset that scores of babies who were aborted were left to die (of hypothermia) rather than treat them so they could live and be adopted.
so watch his summary and read some of the comments from folk who have had run ins with the modern medical system:
This is not about mercy you know: Follow the money.
Few births, a population implosion, and too many unproductive old people who need to be cared for.
And this collapse of medical ethics was foretold by Pope John Paul II thirty years ago LINK
There is a lot of talk of racism in medicine, but there is also prejudice against the elderly and people with low quality of life.
Hmmm... what was that quip about the least of my brothers you did to me?
more resources and information on this can be found HERE. NDY is a disability rights blog.
article about the new varient says the same thing. LINK.
But notice: These reports don't really say anything. Is it as bad as the original covid, or as bad as ordinary influenza, or as bad as a bad cold? Will it kill young and middle age people like the original covid strain, or just we elders who are in bad health and just need a small push to send us to the happy haven in the sky?
But the acceptance of the vaccine is low: The new bivalent vaccine might go to waste because not enough people have bothered to get it. Indeed, originally it was reserved for high risk folk but now they might let others get the bivalent vaccine:
noting their decision stemmed from the slow consumption of the updated jab among the A1 (health care workers) and A2 (senior citizen) subgroups. He said only 38 percent of the 391,000 donated doses allotted for these groups were used.
So get the bivalent vaccine, or wait a few months until the new vaccine against this varient is available? And also what about the flu shot? The flu shot is always an iffy thing: they have to guess which varient of flu will hit, and sometimes they get it wrong, and of course, the shot wears off after a few months so if you give it early it might not protect you by springtime.
this article suggests the hysteria will be not just about the new covid but about flu and RSV (there is a new RSV vaccine they want adults to get).
One of the side effects of the covid coverup (and pushing the vaccine to low risk people who are getting major side effects) is a loss of trust in the system, alas.
So should one get the vaccine or not?
and alas although there are a lot of "WAGD" articles out there about this new covid varient, there is not a lot of hard information out there to make a logical decision.
I am high risk, but at the start of covid epidemic I wrote my will. I had three episodes of bronchitis (one severe) but not bad enough to get a covid test (the employees got the covid test regularly (required for delivering rice in Manila and were all tested negative) but then I got complicated dengue and ended up in the hospital: heh.
So I should get the shot or just hunker down at home. again?
Even an ordinary chest cold could kill me, so should I worry more about this new varient or just worry about the old fashioned colds and flu? What is missing from all these reports is the lethality rate of the new varient: I suspect it is low and that is why the reports are stressing it could cause long covid, not that it will kill you.
in the meanwhile, covid is not a major worry: there is a need for the economy to get running again and to try to get enough cheap rice for the poor people in Manila.
The grand kids have arrived: The last one's plane arrived at midnight so they got here at 4 am.
They are just waking up now: One will have to get a white teeshirt to wear underneath his barong: a white shirt worn over trousers that is formal wear in this country. He is in the wedding party.
Our nephew's wedding is this afternoon: 2 pm followed by a big party where food will be overflowing. Presumably someone will bring me food from the overflow, since I am not quite up to attending a long ceremony and party.
The good news is that Kuya's daughter will be teaching in Manila for the next year: English and Philipino literature.
So after six years away from home she will be able to spend her weekends here.
I am fond of haiku, and the poetry blog FirstKnownWhenLost has a discussion of Haiku, as translated and interpreted by the scholar RH Blyth.
This spring I once again returned to Blyth's wondrous creation: revisiting old favorites, being reminded of haiku I had once read but had forgotten, and making new discoveries.
A pear tree in bloom:
In the moonlight,
A woman reading a letter.
Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume II: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 323.
A night of stars;
The cherry blossoms are falling
On the water of the rice seedlings.
Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 170.
the blogpost notes the book about Haiku by the author RH Blyth which translates and explains the Haiku.
everything else on the internet news etc seems to be hyperventillating about stuff with a critical eye, so I thought I might try to step back and contemplate beauty and unlike a lot of modern poetry, which seems to be political or so obscure that dunderheads like myself can't understand WTF they are talking about, Haiku paints a picture of beauty in one's head, while taking us outside of our own trivial troubles.
The reason for prayer, silence, or meditation on beauty is not to escape from life's problems, but to be strenghtened and to put things into perspective so we can live in hope when facing the travails of life.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
This week, Christians celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration, where the thick headed apostles were given a glimpse of Christ's glory. The feast is most important to Orthodox Christians, who stress mystical aspects of the faith, but there is a lesson even for those of us who are practical minded and often forget this part of religion is important also, because it feeds the soul so we have the strenght to hope.
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There are moments of intimacy, of serenity, of peace, of nearness to God, which everyone has known and wished to prolong. ...
Susanna Wesley had a prayer: "Help me, Lord, to remember that religion is not to be confined to the church or closet, nor exercised only in prayer and meditation, but that everywhere I am in thy presence." The moment of glory does not exist for its own sake; it exists to clothe the common things with a radiance they never had before.
So I am reading StrategyPage: their analysis on countries where I have personal knowledge of what is going on at the grass roots level usually agrees with what I know.
and their news is good: Peace is breaking out all over. Or at least a lot of countries that had nasty wars/insurgencies are now pretty well peaceful.
They note that in the Philippines the local insurgencies are pretty well calmed down: Not just the local communists (who now have morphed back into peaceful activists or decided to use their killing skills on the market as hit men). but also the Muslim insurgencies, where the moderate Islamicists were given political power so have to fight their extremist elements. Long analysis at link.
and the really good news that you probably haven't read: this is not just happening in the Philippines: a lot of those nasty small wars have calmed down:
Since StrategyPage began in 1999 we’ve retired more wars than we’ve added. As we have noted frequently, the trend since the 1990s has been fewer wars. Those we have retired since 1999 include Haiti (2009), Nepal (2010), Sri Lanka (2010), Central Asia (2012), Ivory Coast (2012), Indonesia (2013), Chad (2013), Uganda (2013), Kurds (2013), Philippines (2023), Rwanda (2013), Balkans (2013), Ethiopia (2013), Congo Brazzaville (2013), Colombia (2017), Mexico (2017), Myanmar (2020), Algeria (2020), Sudan (2020) and Thailand (2020). Some of these former updates included nearby conflicts that also ended, like Micronesia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
So we have a lot of problems in the world, but there is now hope:
Here in central Luzon, there is a lot of building going on, both homes and new shops (and a new mall) being opened.
the government is fixing our roads: during the shutdown, there was little traffic and a lot of local money went to help the poor with food or medicine. But now the roads are full of heavy trucks again: Rice trucks coming from the farms, trucks with dirt/fill or gravel for new construction, fresh food delivery trucks, trucks delivering processed food and stuff to the local palenke or shops here in the town center (the malls are on the outskirts as are the newer gated communities).
the weight of the trucks is causing the older roads to crack and chip, so they are gradually repairing/ reinforcing the roadways, and fixing the sewers/drainage ditches so that the streets don't flood every time we have heavy rain.
The electric wires are being replaced with cables and transformers, meaning fewer spaghetti wires sagging to get ensnared by the rice trucks.
Schools have reopened after being on line or using notebooks for two years: and several local students have come to ask for money to buy school supplies since the new school year is to open in August for the next year.
The government decided to make 12 years schooling mandated, but a lot of kids can't afford it so they considering making it only 10 years.
the main problem is paying for medicine: the government funding has a local free clinic run by a nurse practitioner, but often they run out of free rabies shots, or the kids need antibiotics and the very poor can't even afford the five dollars for a course of antibiotics. (average minimum wage is 8 dollars a day, but farmers are often cash poor until the harvest comes in). I let the cook triage them: she knows everyone in this area of town and turns away the scammers and druggies, but if they are poor, she asks me to give them small donation to help pay for the medicine.
there has been a small upsurge in covid: But the numbers are still minimal: 14 deaths reported yesterday. Lots of diarrhea and "broncho" (chest infections) in small kids, and the usual deaths of the elderly from high blood pressure or diabetes or old age.
But Pres Marcos declared the end of the epidemic so everything is now open and no mask required. The gov't has the bivalent covid vaccine and is encouraging people to get it, but there is a lot of "vaccine hesitency" out there: when the epidemic hit, people knew people dying of covid so were eager to get the shot, but now people figure there is herd immunity and that the omicron varient isn't fatal anyway so no shots unless required for school or the job.
So life is almost back to normal, the way it was before covid. And that is the good news too.
every once in awhile, I run across a film that is not about murder, special effects, or superheroes, but a story about ordinary people.
Imagine that: films about ordinary people still exist.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is about an older man who hears an acquaintance is dying of cancer, and decides to walk to her hospice to say goodbye, and tells her to stay alive until he arrives.
During his walk, he gets help from strangers, publicity, and finally becomes open to mourning the death of his only son.
And when he arrives, his friend is dying and unable to speak, so he leaves her a crystal to hang in the window: one of those crystals that make rainbows from the light. And the film ends with his reconciliation with his wife, and the small rainbows appearing to all those he met, who were given hope by his pilgrimage.
so a nice movie to watch with your loved ones when the world seems to be falling apart at the scenes.
big family reunion at the wedding of one of our cousins. Joy will pick up two of Robin's kids Friday, and some of the other relatives are here already. They will be married at our local church and then have a big party at a local venue.
I visited some of them today but will probably skip the wedding: I am getting stronger (hey, I made it through mass on Sunday) but not up to the party.
Is it post Dengue syndrome or old age? since I am recovering slowly I suspect it is the former.
In the meanwhile, there might be a rice problem here: kuya will be replanting the fields next week if the fields dry out a bit. (no typhoon in the forcast so only monsoon rains to cope with).
this will continue until the harvest in the fall. To make things worse, some countries are limiting rice exports (e.g. India)
While traders expected the mid-October harvest season in the region to boost local supply, rice prices would not likely go down because of existing rice export restrictions from India that have been keeping up the rice prices coming from Vietnam, a major source of rice imported to the Philippines, said Bacus.
Diesel is going up (used for farm machinery, drying, milling, and transporting rice to market) meaning that the price of rice will go up for consumers and our profit margin will shrink.
El Niño and the damage left by Typhoon #EgayPH have become a key concern of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. who said the Philippines would have to import rice again. Read this story by @AdrianINQ to know more. #INQFocushttps://t.co/bo2Zgf9NgG
and in the meanwhile, China is increasing their aggression against the Philippines in the west Philippine sea.
With the US showing weakness, and China having internal problems with floods and corruption, will they decide to pull a wag the dog scenerio?
The #CCP has declared a “people’s war” war on #America—a declaration with great significance in #China—so we should acknowledge the situation and declare that regime to be our “enemy.” This determination would, among other things, facilitate application of our treason statute.
