Light blogging, mainly busy with doing ordinary things.
The ceiling in the alcove where we hang clothes indoors (in rainy season) collapsed, so I hired two men to replace it.
the ceiling fell, not from the leaky roof but termites. So they removed the entire ceiling, put up new struts, and sprayed the replacement wood of the ceiling. I guess I should have put up a plasticized ceiling, but never mind. Feral cats tend to run around up there, and we have had several incidents where they fell through the plastic skylight in the ceiling, and one into my bathroom through the white plasticized ceiling there.
No cats here for two years, when all the cats in the neighborhood disappeard, presumably from an epidemic, and we still have one or two in the garage. I miss my cats but the dogs are aggressive and it's hard to keep kittens alive.
sigh.
Got my yearly checkup, and since my routine lab was okay asked for some advanced tests, which were also normal. Presumably my fatigue is just old age and/or long covid or post dengue fatigue. But my weight has gone up 8 pounds so I will have to start eating less. Sigh.
All the puppies have gone to new homes, but we kept one black female. The father is a neighbor's dog, and large so hopefully she will take after him and be another fairly good sized watch dog.
Ironically, the larger dogs here are scary but don't bite: it is the mediumsized mamadog who bit Ruby for getting too close to her puppies.
why is the Malthusian ïdea "we're all gonna die" being pushed by the elites?
Because there is money in them there hills.
Indeed, even though these predictions have been going on for centuries, Ehrlich continues to push the idea that to get rid of poverty, get rid of poor people.
The Population Bomb, written with his wife Anne Ehrlich in 1968, predicted “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in the 1970s
– some thing that never happened, but never mind: he is still a hero and his ideas of getting rid of excess people is still popular today,
of course, no one wants to admit they want to get rid of the people or how they plan to do it: it is usually phrased as lowering the population, something that could take decades. Unless they let people starve and/or die of disease.
place covid lab conspiracy theory here.
Starving people because the plan needs fewer people to implement their utopia has been done before, as the Irish and the Ukrainians can tell you.
Yes famines still occur: climate problems in history have led to major famines, and of course, some are due to war, displacing civilians, disrupting the supply chain, or when some farmers who lose their crops and no one helps them survive this temporary famine.
Another problem is NGOs so busy pushing old fashioned methods of farming in the name of a "sustainable green future"; never mind that using traditional methods of agriculture would not be able to feed today's population.
For example, NGOs hate GMO crops,
How much do they hate GMO crops? Well, when Zimbabwe was having a famine (because the most productive white farmers were chased out of the country, leading to a food shortage), Mugabe refused to accept American grain, because he said it might contain GMO seeds, and his experts told him these seeds, if planted could contaminate the local crops.
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But when I worked in Africa, many NGO's also opposed newer high yield hybrids because they meant buying seeds, using fertilizer and herbicides to grow the food.
I am old enough to remember hunger in post war Europe and the various Chinese famines...in contrast, the main problem right now in Asia is.... obesity.
Borlaug began his agricultural revolution in Asia. With India and Pakistan facing food shortages due to rapid population growth, the importation of Borlaug’s dwarf wheat in the mid-1960s was responsible for a 60 percent increase in harvests there, helping both countries to become agriculturally self-sufficient. His work in developing countries, especially on the Indian subcontinent, is estimated to have saved as many as one billion people from starvation and death.
italics mine
The increased yields resulting from Borlaug’s new strains empowered many developing countries, though their use required large amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. These high-yielding crops raised concerns about cost and potentially harmful environmental effects,
italics mine.
The same experts who predicted famine now were lamenting the fertilizer run off in streams etc... These problems can be solved, of course, and are a lesser evil than a hundreds of thousands of dead peasants. But the experts see only the problem, and are pushing old fashioned organic farming as the way to go.
Now, we grow organic rice, but the dirty little secret is that it is more expensive, more prone to disease, and produces a smaller crop.
about a more efficient way to produce fertilizer and use less fossil fuels to do so.
Good news if this pans out.
a technical article: so why is this important?
Ammonia, produced in the Haber-Bosch process, is currently one of the most essential base chemicals for the world to produce fertilizers, with an annual production of 110 million tonnes. The journal Nature proposed in 2001 that the Haber-Bosch process was the most critical scientific invention for humankind during the 20th century, since it has saved around 4 billion people’s lives by preventing mass starvation. An estimation of the nitrogen content in our bodies’ DNA and proteins shows that half of the atoms can be derived from Haber-Bosch.
One of the more absurd items on youtube is about a musician in the UK who plays the public piano (i.e. a piano put there that anyone can play).
and who was streaming (luckily) his music, and then some Chinese carrying a Chinese flag tried to stop him, and when he asked if they were Chinese, they accused him of racism.
Here is the video, (until they take it down for complaints). I should add that early in the video he calls them Japanese, which is maybe why he asked if they were Chinese. And notice that they are merely standing around for nine minutes and didn't bother to move, which would have been easy.
Turn on to listen to the wonderful music, or if you want to see absurdity in action fast forward to nine minutes....
...music restarts at 30 minute mark.
in the meanwhile, the ChiComs are busy spreading their side of the story, which of course is proved to be a lie if you watch the video. So they are now trying to get the video removed from You tube.
A little late, since over 8 million folk have already watched it.
to show he wasn't picking on the Chinese, here is an older video of playing at what appears to be the same site. Playing piano and interacting with some of those listening, and even asking them to join him in making music...
....
Note he has 2 million followers so if youtube demonatizes him, it will affect his income. Never mind that their story is proved to be a lie by the original video.
I should also note that he has videos of various security type trying to shut him down in the past.
The piano was donated and placed there by Elton John, with the idea that ordinary folk could play it in public.
And although the piano was corded off after the incident, it is now released to be played.
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update: the free Hong Kong activists use the piano to protest how China has destroyed freedom in that city.
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update
these vloggers explain both sides of the story, putting it into context of Chinese culture.
Well, they destroyed Star Wars, Dr Who, and Tolkien by making diversity more important than little things like decent scripts and actors who actually know how to act, but never mind. They aren't done.
Next step; Remake the Wizard of Oz to make it more diverse.
Elon Musk took his kid along to Auschwitz, ignoring guidance to leave young children at home
Story by kcorcoran@businessinsider.com (Kieran Corcoran) •
: “For many liberal Jews, it was hard to ignore that it wasn’t the boogeyman white supremacists that they had been warned about their entire lives. No, it was their professors, their co-workers at the nonprofit, friends of their college-aged kids calling for an end to Israel and celebrating the murder of Jews.
someone said that Jews are the canary in the coal mine: First the Jews, then siccing the FBI on those who bought bibles
nothing new under the sun, of course, but the ignorance of history allows them to get away with lies. the meme is blame the west, while ignoring the real story of who did most of these murders.
Killing people in the name of utopia is the reason so many died in the twentieth century:
some people noticed: It's Lenin's birthday, and one of these days we're going to notice he started the twentieth century genocides.
Lenin, and his archetypal successor, Stalin, were among the greatest monsters in human history — with far more victims than Hitler, but less than Mao. Those who embrace Communism, to this day, must explain the accumulation of tens of millions of corpses, in exchange for nothing gained.
David Warren's article on Lenin adds this snarky but true commentary on the latest Vatican idea that no one is going to hell:
Does God have a plan to save murderers like these? It would have to be “secret,” for it is not mentioned in any document He inspired. God, I should think, does not do “secrets” like that.
But, perhaps theology is as far above my head as it is over “Tucho” Fernández’s.
“Much to our disappointment, we found at least 10 stores still selling mercury-contaminated facial and underarm whitening creams from Pakistan and Thailand. This is despite the recent store inspections conducted by the QCHD in response to the complaints we lodged against the errant sellers,” it added.
here in Asia, skin whitening cosmetics are used a lot.
Heck, even the deodorant has skin whiteners in it (is this for acanthosis nigricans or is it just a normal problem with pigmentation)?
this article from a cosmetic site says it is similar to the darkening on the face during pregnancy, or maybe from irritation or maybe from using deodorants, and talks about expensive treatments for it....a lot of articles blame deodorants...
but that sounds crazy because I never ran into this in the USA.
or rather I did run into it: We saw a lot of acanthosis nigricans in our Native American population, which is thickened and dark skin on the neck or other regions, including the armpit...and we viewed it as a marker for metabolic syndrome which predisposes this population for diabetes.
So is the darkening armpits that lead to whitening agents in deodorant due to the fact that people are now getting fatter so we see this appearing? or is it from hormonal changes that darken the skin e.g. chloasma...
But there are numerous reports of mercury in skin whitening products: And a lot of worry because mercury is a very nasty chemical. And when women use it, there is the additional worry about it being absorbed into her blood and poisoning the growing baby.
however, a lot of western reporters simply point to evil white people for the fact that Asians use skin whiteners to look "white"...(I think it has to do with the fact that poor people work outside in the sun and rich people stay inside so have white skin)...
but if a lot of these products are in your deodorant, then I guess you can't blame racism for this.
Harvard Scientist Stunned: Oreos Surpass Statins in Lowering His Cholesterol
In a very specific experiment, Oreo cookies were shown to outperform traditional cholesterol medication in lowering cholesterol.https://t.co/BQWM9XGtiq
Oreo Cookie Treatment Lowers LDL Cholesterol More Than High-Intensity Statin therapy in a Lean Mass Hyper-Responder on a Ketogenic Diet: A Curious Crossover Experiment
in other words, this is true for only a subgroup of thin people whose LDL goes up when they are on the ketogenic diet (i.e. no carbs).
Presumably it doesn't work for the rest of us, alas.
Schickele devoted himself to P.D.Q. Bach for 50 years, presenting the composer’s extensive compositional output and unique place in music history.
His works were often plays and parodies on the classical canon – for example, the 1712 Overture, Canine Cantata: Wachet, Arf! (Sleeping Dogs, Awake!), Grand Serenade for an Awful Lot of Winds and Percussion, and A Little Nightmare Music.
I checked: The word God and the name Jesus is missing from the letter.
Note that having the Catholic church as your ally means that the bishops etc can pressure governments in small countries and remember their schools educated much of the ruling class in many countries.
(In the US, for example, Georgetown Univ alumni include oodles of world leaders of both parties. Something to remember when you read the hysteria about Yale and Harvard)
I am still rereading the Tale of Genji, and books about the culture of that period of Japan.
So quick: What does Genji, Lolita, and the film Pricilla have in common? Finding a young girl and grooming her to fit your idea of the ideal wife.
I could probably add WoodyAllen's seduction of his wife's adopted daughter, foot binding in China (this was done because men found small feet sexually arousing), and the way Confucian rules, Islamic rules, and even Christian rules limited women''s desire for self fulfillment...
Reading Lolita in Tehran is about the way that powerful men groom women into what they want women to be. In her book she finds a parallel between the pedophile writer of Lolita and the Mullah's crackdown on women in education and dress after the revolution.
The irony? In medical school, the book Lolita was used by our psychiatrist teacher to point out how very young women wanted sex: but Nafisi points out that the book is actually written by the pedophile and is his point of view (to justify his sexual abuse of her).
So add Freudian sexual theory into how men project their ideas onto women, and although his stress on trying to stop sexual repression was good, the end result was not liberation of women but teaching women it is better to be promiscuous than repressed as wives, meaning more responsibility free sex for men.
A lot of the patients seen by Freud were repressed (not just sexually of course: that's what he got wrong. These upper class ladies were put into a box telling them they had to be submissive wives, not independent workers and equal to their husbands).
One result of repressing desire (sexual and other personal areas) or by severe life stress (as in refugees) is conversion reaction: aka Hysteria.
We rarely see this in the USA, but I did see it in tribal Africa. And one only has to read Victorian novels where you read about those crazy ladies in the attic who were hysterics trying to cope with a society where they essentially were limited in what they could do. This was the theme of Jane Eyre, where Jane was trying to cope with her limited choices and of course the crazy wife in the attic who went crazy after a forced marriage...and this was one reason that it was both popular and controversial.
Back to Genji: how did women cope in this novel? Polygamy was fine for Genji and other men, but the women were miserable, as the female author of this book makes clear. Indeed, a lot of these women literally went crazy: in that society this hysteria was defined as spirit possession, and Genji's wives suffered from various versions of it.
Goodreads review notes that by becoming possessed, women assert control over their own lives.
From this male-centered perspective, female jealousy provides a convenient explanation for the emergence of mono no ke within the polygynous marital system of the Heian aristocracy. Yet this conventional view fails to take into account the work's female authorship and its largely female audience. Relying upon anthropological as well as literary evidence, Doris G. Bargen foregrounds the motives of the possessed character and located mono no ke within the politics of Heian society, interpreting spirit possession as a female strategy adopted to counter male strategies of empowerment. Possessions become "performances" by women attempting to redress the balance of power; they subtly subvert the structure of domination and significantly alter the construction of gender.
My main disagreement with her excellent book is that this is written as if the spirit possession/hysteria was a deliberate choice, whereas I see it in the same way that passive aggression works in real life: the woman cannot chose, but her subconscious desires pop up and voila, conversion reaction occurs that helps her to cope (in this case, spirit possession but in real life, often hypochondria or exaggeration of real illnesses).
All of this is something to remember when you read stuff about the wonderfulness of polyandry or why we need to destroy marriage as a patriarchal institution.
Yes, under Confucian laws (in Genji), Islamic laws, or the now almost defunct laws of Christian fundamentalism in western Europe, women were put into a box and had choices limited. But men were also limited: they were pressured to take care of the women they seduced and the children they begot in such societies.
But if you want to raise children safely, being in a safe box with a man to protect you might be better than trying to cope with a full time job and raising children without any husband or extended family to help you.
Finally I should note that in Genji, another way women coped when threatened by unwanted attention or marriages was to cut their hair and become a Buddhist nun.
This probably worked in medieval Europe, both for women who didn't want a husband or for women who wanted to be nurses or teachers or scholars. However, contrary to the plot of the frustrated wife in She Came to Me, modern convents in the west won't let you come in to flee your marriage or the world.
so what is the answer?
I don't have a single answer. Life is complicated, but the modern idea to just destroy these rules ignore the innate biological facts that we were born sexual beings, and the religious idea that we were born in a time and place and with a body that includes sex and other desires, and it is how we cope with all of life that is important in the long run.
Which is why Murasaki's novel remains important to study to introduce a non Western voice into the loud rhetoric of the modern man hating feminists.
they removed the youtube video from Dr. Campbell about that covid lethal brain virus that I posted about a few days ago. But it is still on RUmble:
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China continues to bully the Philippines:
It is a hint that China wants to continue to steal our fish and petroleum resources in the West Philippine sea, so the Philippines needs to make nice with China.
Meaning that if they can claim Taiwan, they can later claim VietNam, Luzon, and Singapore.
and of course it means they can control the sea lanes much more efficiently, not to mention the internet cables that go by that island.
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we have koi and goldfish in our fountain. Here is a video on goldfish:
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in family news: The puppies are eating so it's time to send them to new homes. Two went next door to replace the watchdog there, and one to a neighbor. Joy wants two for her farm which leaves us one.
We need to keep a breeding female since Mama dog is getting older, but I don't think I can cope with house training another dog.
“the Lord blesses everyone, everyone, everyone, those who come. Every person.”
true, but he didn't approve of everyone's behavior...I sort of remember something about millstones and brood of vipers, and the cheating merchants got a bit of a lashing,
but never mind. presumably Francis is one of those Catholics who never reads the bible, as the protestants are always telling us...
And then Francis goes on to defend his position by distorting a famous parable taught by Jesus:
The Pope argued that the Church’s “cordial dimension” comes from the Gospel parable of the missing wedding guests:...This is what the Lord says, not what I say. The problem is when we make selections: this one yes, this one no… Let Him do it.
silly me. The missing wedding guests were missing because they were busy doing their thing and refused to come. This refers to those who reject religion as a waste of time or nothing to do with their lives. Since these good people don't want to serve God, the poor and travelers and street people were invited to come in and eat the free food.
The special wedding garments were provided by the king himself. A feast filled with appropriately dressed guests would be an honor to the king. A person inappropriately dressed would bring dishonor upon the king and cause a shame to the happy occasion.
the entire episode of the Pope and his minion pushing blessings of unmarried couples (this includes divorced and polygamous couples, not just those who are gay or who have open marriages) is about distorting language to confuse people, in order to push the agenda of sexual liberation on them.
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Why not do as pre Vatican II Catholics always did: tell them about God's mercy, encourage them to follow God's rules, but if they cannot to go to church and pray for God's mercy without receiving the Eucharist, which even Paul notes can not be taken if one is living in sin.
This is just one more step by the same modernist clergy and theologians who destroyed Vatican II's ideas with ideas that led to many Catholics leaving the church.
And nowadays, we see this type busy destroying not just Catholicism but a lot of good churches by pushing an agenda that goes against not just the Bible but the ideas of the good pagans (Confucius anyone?) on how to live a life of goodness and duty instead of a life of manipulative narcissism.
and so Francis, instead of answering his critics in clear language, is again calling them names and manipulating language to confuse matters and not correcting the pornographer who wrote the decree or criticizing the PC who openly bless gay relationships and tell the press gay marriage is the next step.
First throw out thou shalt not commit adultery, then throw out Thou shalt not steal (Vatican bank scandals) and don't forget thou shalt not kill (praise communism and let communist countries like China take over the church because communists talk nice and are so idealistic, and just ignore the 100 million deaths from communism).
There is a reason that the word Jesuitical is used to describe such manipulation,
in the meanwhile, Maureen Mullarchey notes this is just one more way language is being distorted to push an agenda:
Self-justified worthies gerrymander realities without apology. They confer high awards on finesse in dissembling. Language obfuscates; clarity is penalized.
Two contemporary parallels come to mind, one ecclesial, the other secular.
During the COVID-19 panic, the CDC gave the word vaccine a makeover. It tweaked language in order to sell the public on an inadequately tested gene therapy being used as if it were a vaccine in the traditional sense that Edward Jenner might recognize. The definition of vaccination was renovated—”repurposed” chirped one medical expert—to accommodate an update in technology.
True. Of course, some of the vaccines were vaccines: I took the AZ vaccine, which uses old fashioned adenovirus technology. Ironically, it causes the blood clots, something that seems to be related to the spike protein of all vaccines and the disease itself.
She then goes on to say:
As with vaccine, the noun blessing has been repurposed. Updated to reflect change in Vatican weather, it has been divided. One half, reserved for sacramental marriage between a man and woman, is the sole existing liturgical act. The other half—an informal subdivision but nonetheless hallowed—can be openly granted to same-sex couples.
Fiducia supplicans: On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings formalizes the bifurcation. It opens our clouded eyes to previously unseen distinctions within the concept of blessings. To facilitate this taffy-pull, FS separates the term couple from its established role as a signal of a sexual relationship.
but of course this is not the end of the church's support of evil: She also cites the defense of Hamas by certain bishops. Like the praise of communism, it is praise for the propaganda that sees them as liberators and defenders of the poor, while overlooking their atrocities, lies and propaganda.
Crowning the indecency of Pizzaballa’s suggestive parade was a mendacious, historically ignorant manger scene. Constructed in Manger Square, it was a politicized propaganda piece that usurped traditional, theologically-infused depictions of the newborn Jesus. Note what substituted for an infant in swaddling clothes: the corpse of an infant covered face to toe with a winding cloth and ready for burial. Razor wire around the scene concretizes the meme that Gaza is “an open-air prison.” The Star of Bethlehem appears as a rocket crater through a roof—a Gazan roof in this context.
The blackened assemblage is hardly a non-partisan plea for peace. It is more sly than that. It conveys a parallel between the Holy Family and the Palestinians. Israel’s genocidal bombing kills babies, you see. Hint, hint: Jews are murdering Christ again.
A more up-to-date and politically honest manger scene would show a Hamas weapons cache under the crèche.
yes. That part is always ignored by the Hamas lovers who prefer the illusion to the facts.
Mullarkey then notes that there is a common thread in this:
Francis’ hostility to the West—and the orthodoxy that nourished it?—is palpable.
There is no way around the fact that both cardinals were chosen to reflect Pope Francis’ ultimate aims.
and not just the west of course. Hatred of Christianity and hatred of truth.
and then, voila, he morphs into his usual "look squirrel" mode says: look at the poor.
But of course, the war against the sacrament of marriage will weaken the family and make it harder for the poor to exist.
And his rants against capitalism ignores that it is capitalism, with all it's faults, that lifted the majority of the world out of dire poverty over the last 50 years.
And the result? he is ignoring the persecution of believers in that country that is busy rewriting church dogmas and the Bible so that people worship the state, not God. (add Thou shalt have no other gods before me to the list of cancelled commandments).
And not just for Catholic of course.
The CCP sees itself as possessing absolute authority over religion in China. For example, in 2018, the Vatican compromised with the CCP on the prerogative to appoint Roman Catholic clergy in China. Multiple sources have warned that the CCP aims to select the next Dalai Lama—the supreme leader of Tibetan Buddhism.
Thus, the CCP forcing the church to be subservient to the state infringes the Western conception of religious liberty, which is founded on the Christian understanding of the church and the state as distinct institutions ordained by God.
Relations with China
An important question that Francis has to decide on by October 2024 relates to the Sino-Vatican provisional agreement that was signed in Beijing on Sept 22, 2018, regarding the nomination of bishops in mainland China. The Holy See and China renewed this agreement in 2020 and 2022. This year, the two sides will have to decide whether to renew the agreement for another two years, to make it permanent or to introduce changes to it.
Sigh.
So much damage in so little time.
And although some bishops are trying to draw the line here, none of them has the courage to say: this guy is destroying the church. Kick him out.
sigh.
Looking forward to bishops - especially those online - engaging with this latest...development. "Principal teacher of his diocese" and all that. Here's the thing - if you don't want the Big Bad Laity to dominate the discourse on these matters...speak up. Do your jobs.
On review, I am a bit aghast that I seem to be rigid and have no mercy.
But one only has to see how the sociopaths, greedy, hateful, and narcissists manipulate the idea of mercy to get away with destroying those rigid rules that keep their behavior under a bit of control.
SciFi author Sarah Hoyt, who grew up in small town Portugal, wrote this recently about the globalists who want to rule our lives: That's not how any of that works.
What they missed, of course, that any rural kid knows is that you don’t feed livestock on what humans can eat. Instead, you feed the stuff humans can’t eat, the stuff left after processing corn, or wheat or whatever to… well, you feed just about anything to pigs. But you can feed wheat straw to cows. And frankly, you can pasturage cows on land where you can’t grow anything. They’re not like goats, that you can feed on three tin cans and an old log, but they still can digest hard vegetable matter humans can’t eat.
One could say the same for sheep and goats.
Indeed, the reason for China not eating beef is partly Buddhism but partly because the oxen were used to plow and pull wagons, not for meat. And unlike Europe etc. they didn't have mountainous areas or marginal land for herders to raise cattle, which could then be exchanged for grain etc. as was done in Europe, where the Germanic tribes sold cattle to the Romans because it was hard to plow and grow crops before more modern plows were available.
So why all the hysteria about beef? Steak is seen as a rich man's food.
But of course, the modern hamburger is what took over the world: Cheap, tasty and filling, and a good source of protein. Along with cheap chicken and processed food full of preservatives to slow down deterioration to prolong the shelf life so that less food is thrown out.
So Asia is no longer full of small people periodically starving in famines, but has fairly large and often obese people.
But of course beef is popular but not the main source of animal protein, which is fish: both fished and grown in fish farms
And don't forget Chickens! Yes you can grow them in your back yard, but the cheap chicken meat is grown en masse in buildings: and this is one of the big revolutions in the world, what the greens lament as factory farms that mainly use one type of chicken (monoculture). \
Yes there is a danger of die off if bird flu hits, But how else do you feed the growing urban population with cheap meat (not to mention cheap eggs)
Yes, you can raise them in your back yard (I read Tolkien did this during WWII so his kids could have eggs to eat) but with bird flu, some places have banned this practice.
but instead of saying eat chicken or fish, she insists we eat fake meat,
but if people say that fake meat tastes like cardboard, well, maybe if we mix fake meat with beef we can persuade people to eat it.
Hello. one can bring a horse to water, but one can't make him drink.
One of the problems of feeding people in famines is that they will refuse food they are unfamiliar with or object to. Pork in Muslim countries, shell fish in some African areas, and bugs in the USA (except for the survivalists who eat grasshoppers).
So what do we eat here in the Philippines (aside from organic brown rice three times a day)?
Actually we eat fish or eggs, and the meat is pork or chicken.
For ten years we rarely ate beef, but after swine flu hit local farms we are now eating beef in a stew three times a week.
The reason for eating more beef? African swine flu killed a lot of local pigs so the price and availability of pork is a problem.
The real problem to feed more people is to stop agricultural diseases.
Illness is a big danger: African swine flu (which got here via smuggled contaminated food even though there was a strict quarantine to imports from countries with this problem).
We are off the migration flights so avian flu should not be a problem but now and then we get reports of isolated cases: which would mean no chicken, and no eggs, and no quail eggs, and no balut since that is made from duck eggs.
Of course, cattle (and water buffalo) are not immune: there is hoof and mouth disease epidemic in nearby Indonesia.
Right now I am reading about the diseases and nutritional deaths at the time of the Philippine revolution against Spain, and one disease that contributed to the hunger was rinderpest which meant the waterbuffalo who pulled the plows died off and local farmers couldn't grow rice.
so they imported rice to prevent starvation, but the imported rice was polished white rice that contributed to an outbreak of beriberi.
This would not happen nowadays: because in the last 20 years our area is now transitioning to hand-plows (large rototillers that use diesel) and the water buffalo are being transitioned to provide milk to local markets.
Waterbuffalo yogurt anyone?
And I am always bemused at these experts who say using factory made fake meat (to make someone rich) is the answer, when other forms of protein are widely available. Tofu, yogurt, and peanut butter are a good source of protein, as are yeast products like Marmite, and of course don't forget fish, which can be farmed.
But yes they do sell hamburgers now in town, all over the place, and it's quite cheap.
of course, she is talking about sophisticated upper middle class types, not the taxi drivers in Manila who eat a Jollibee hamburger at the end of the day (and if he can't afford Jollibee, kiosks sell them even cheaper).
The same guys who funded wuhan were trying to fund a lab here in the Philippines. No I don't know if they are still planning this, but I did find someone in Indonesia who supported such a lab as a good way to make money.
reading up on the historical background of the Tale of Genji, and the Haien period of Japan, it is just an essay on disease per se.
Subverting Prepfar.
Again a cross post about how the PC are trying to subvert Prepfar, which gives medicine to those with HIV, to expand to push their sexual agenda. When religious folk object, they are accused of being non compassionate (leaving out the context, including that pushing abortion and contraception and homosexuality will make locals mistrust the program).
Apparently this is a big scandal in the UK, but I never heard about it until I ran across this story in a Japanese paper.
After the Post Office rolled out the Horizon information technology system, developed by Japanese company Fujitsu, in 1999 to automate sales accounting, local Post Office managers began finding unexplained losses they were responsible to cover.
The state-owned Post Office maintained Horizon was reliable and accused branch managers of dishonesty. Between 2000 and 2014, around 900 postal workers were wrongly convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting, with some going to prison and others forced into bankruptcy.
This story has been perculating for years in the UK but a recent miniseries is what has brought the scandal to a head.
Since 2009 CSHL has partnered with the Suzhou Industrial Park in Suzhou, China to create Cold Spring Harbor Asia which annually draws some 3,000 scientists to its meetings and courses.[9] The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory School of Biological Sciences, formerly the Watson School of Biological Sciences, was founded in 1999.[10]
was this done with fetal tissue, or other sources of stem cells: the labs no longer identify such things in the articles about humanized mice.
But SciAmerican in 2015 defends the use of tissue from second trimester abortions.
Why second trimester? Dirty little secret: Because up to 9 weeks, abortion sucks the kid out in pieces but after 12 weeks there are bones and it has to be aborted intact with chemicals (which means a dead fetus whose organs are too deteriorated to use) or dismembered piece by piece carefully so the hardening bones don't perforate the uterus.
here is how the journal article describes this:
Every month, Lishan Su receives a small test tube on ice from a company in California. In it is a piece of liver from a human fetus aborted at between 14 and 19 weeks of pregnancy.
Su and his staff at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill carefully grind the liver, centrifuge it and then extract and purify liver- and blood-forming stem cells. They inject the cells into the livers of newborn mice, and allow those mice to mature. The resulting animals are the only ‘humanized’ mice with both functioning human liver and immune cells and, for Su, they are invaluable in his work on hepatitis B and C, allowing him to probe how the viruses evade the human immune system and cause chronic liver diseases.
that was from a 2015 article, so I apologize: things probably have changed since then... since that article was published, a Japanese researcher, troubled by the ethical implications, found a way to make stem cells without fetal tissue.
but the fetal parts industry continues to be a lucrative source of funds.
this article notes that the whistleblower behind this expose has been sued by Planned Parenthood in California for recording them admitting to this illegal practice.
so much for whistleblowing protection.
which is why you don't hear about this much in the MSM, who of course loves aborting unwanted babies defending the right to the integrity of a woman's body.
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for later listening:
Ep. 60 Is the lesson of the Covid disaster that we should give its architects more power? Bret Weinstein on the WHO’s plans for you. pic.twitter.com/ku3O5BdeoF
Michael Yon has another great post that gives the background on the drug cartels trying to take over Ecuador, whose recently elected president is trying to stop them.
The background? Drug and people smuggling.
Ecuador --this is the well-established route established by Chinese through Colombia, Darien, CA -- to future American suburban rape and murder victims.
— Michael Yon: Callsign BIG HONEY 6 (@Michael_Yon) January 10, 2024
I have family in Pasto, which is on the Pan American highway near the Ecuador border.
The last time I was there was 30 years ago, but my son was there last year and said that the area is now dangerous.
Drugs are not produced in Pasto: it is too high in altitude. But it is on the Pan American highway, and the communist FARC was around back then, and used to hide in Ecuador.
I last visited in the 1990s, when FARC was still around. Pasto had low crime at the time, and yes FARC was busy but my son's brother in law was in FARC at the time so we figured we were safe.
The border is a bridge, but usually buses with shoppers stop and let people out. The cars are checked but those on foot were not inspected. (Colombians would shop there for cheap stuff, Ecuadorians shop in Colombia for higher quality stuff).
and when the local airport got fogged in, we took a taxi up the highway to the next city, about an eight hour ride, to catch our flight.
But now Yon is reporting on about a lot of Chinese visitors in Pasto who are planning to go to the USA.
I don't know if this is being reported in the USA, but the drug gangs are attacking the press and the government in Ecuador: the story has reached the Phil Inquirer, although the story didn't have a lot of details.
Nature magazine article blames poor Africans for global warming:
we rice farmers in Asia have long been blamed for global warming, but now Nature Magazine is blaming Africa too. Guess we peasants need to starve to protect mother gaia.https://t.co/IAen9yyYql
Some background: West Africa has their own rice variety, but it shatters easily, so many farmers are changing to Asian rice. In other words, many areas of Africa eat rice (the article on China is about Madagascar, which was originally populated from Malays from Indonesia in ancient time, so they grow rice).
and years ago, I had to flee my job in Liberia when there was a revolution. The cause? An increase in the price of rice
I am pro ecology and anti pollution, but the push against farmers is a very dangerous trend.
This week it is the German farmers up in arms.
As for us: The high price of fertilizer and diesel lower our ability to make a profit.
Yes, rice growing produces methane: Which is why we use the dry method where we flood the fields to stop the weeds from growing a lot less, but since we are organic this means we can't use the herbicides to cut down the weeds.
a dilemma: Organic vs high tech.
The Green religion pretends to love organic, but for rice farmers they hate both ways to grow rice...
so what is their plan? Starve the peasants?
Covid shutdowns already have caused inflation and economic damage.
and now, the push is not to use hydropower or geothermal electricity which we already use, but to put up solar panels (wonder what will happen when typhoons hit? Never mind)...
You see, some rich guys are planning to build huge solar farms in our area, which is a major rice growing region in the Philippines. Hmm.. wonder what that will do to our rice.
We have been offered money to sell or rent our fields for this. Being short of money Kuya is considering this for our farms on a small hill, which are expensive to irrigate so we only can get one crop a year on them.
But he is worried that the run off will poison the rice growing in the lower field.
In the meanwhile, some thugs were asking our contract farmers (who sell us their rice for our organic rice business) asking where we live, saying they want to talk to him about buying our land. Why do I say thugs? The masks of course. And because the farmers were afraid of them. Luckily for us they told them that they didn't know our address.
It almost makes me wish we still owned Lolo's World War II submachine gun that he used to keep in our closet. But now we are gun free, alas and only have dogs and machetes for protection. And alas George our killer Labrador has gone to heaven, so we only have small dogs to protect us.
Some of us are old enough to remember the old Timex commercials.
The Timex was essentially a cheap watch that ordinary people could afford, and one of it's selling points was that it was rugged and wouldn't break easily:
it's slogan was It takes a licking and keeps on ticking...
So one might say cynically, well that's nice but they don't make them like they used to.
But maybe you are wrong:
This is a triumph of modern engineering and quality control by Chinese manufacturing.
While it’s tempting to take the Made in China text on an iPhone at face value, not everything that goes into making an Apple product comes from one place.
The iPhone’s display, for example, is made by either Samsung or LG in South Korea. The flash memory and DRAM, on the other hand, likely come from Kioxia’s factories in Japan. And the Gorilla Glass that protects the screen could make its way from a Corning factory in the USA, Taiwan, or Japan. Apple’s A-series SoC, meanwhile, is custom silicon designed in California but manufactured by Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC. And we’ve barely even scratched the surface with this list so far.
an example of the interrelatedness of today's world and a warning that the modern world relies on a supply chain,
But anyway, in today's world where emphasis on equity means that more time is spent shaming employee into agreement instead of evil science, it's nice to know that some things still work.
Blogger Vox Cantoris, who is infamous for catching a big shot priest from the saltandlight network for serial plagiarism, is now reporting that several Catholic sites that have actually read books in Spanish from the nincompoop who is pushing blessings of "irregular" unions and finding that they are x rated.
BREAKING: Vatican’s Chief Guardian of Doctrine Wrote Pornographic, Blasphemous Book.
What he wrote about orgasms is SO graphic, we refuse to reproduce it, but given his intimate descriptions, we have to ask, “How does he know this?” Some things are known by experience, alone.… pic.twitter.com/ClAZbmbS6X
Pornographic books? Don't ask me: I am busy and don't have time to check it out. '
But it sounds like X rated excerpts of Father Greeley's novels, which are the R rated version of JP2's Theology of the body. In other words, similar to saying Deep Throat is the same as the Song of Songs.
CNA report says the guy insists he wouldn't write such stuff today.
okay then. So resign and repent.
But instead he is pushing the same ideas, mixing them with good stuff to camouflage what is being promoted, and giving the naive and the manipulative narcissists a way to pretend it doesn't say what it actually says.
His decree released in the name of the Pope says there is no problem with blessing irregular unions (i.e. polygamy, gay partnerships including the many relationships which often are not monogamous if the statistics are to be believed, and those of divorced Catholics who somehow didn't meet the very low standards to get an annulment)...
Written in confusing unclear language, and at the end to shut up the opposition he includes a clause that insisted he would not clarify it. And when there was an uproar, he put out two clarifications that only emphasized the confusing language and again saying shut up.
the MSM is gleefully promoting this as blessing of gay unions and coming soon full gay marriage and eliminating Thou shalt not commit adultery from the ten commandments
however, like the gender stuff being pushed by the English Anglicans, this call for blessing is making the Christians elsewhere revolt. (not just Catholics but the orthodox bishops and many Christian leaders of other churches have objected.)
Oh, it's a private blessing he insists, but then you see photos of these blessings in the press, and a picture is worth a thousand words...
The African bishops are up in arms about this, since many of them have faced real persecution and death threats for being Christian and defending human rights, and are apparently not afraid of mean tweets.
Could schism be far behind?
But the MSM reports this not as a serious dogmatic error that could lead to schism, but merely as a "mixed reception" to the document (read: most bishops in the affluent white European countries where no one attends church, support it. So who cares if some third world bishops who say: wait a second this is against the Bible.)
Francis has done similar things before, but this crossed a line since it was an official document. This meant it went beyond an informal comment on an airplane to the press, like saying "who am I to judge" about hiring abishop with a known moral problem to run the Vatican Bank.
He is not willing to judge a guy whose sexual peccadillos leave him open to blackmail? No problem, maybe because he can blackmail anyone who tries to point a finger at him...
However, the Pope's comments could be understood as not judging the sincerity of someone who has repented, which is what Catholics have always believed: and this applies to all types of sinners who repented their sins and were who humbly trying to live a sinless life.
But instead, the PC press reported the Pope as if he said gay sex of any sort was ok.
This more recent document however is a bit harder for the Catholics to ignore: That is why it has a lot more people out there saying the Pope is a heretic, and some are hinting that maybe someone out there should do something about it.
Looking forward to bishops - especially those online - engaging with this latest...development. "Principal teacher of his diocese" and all that. Here's the thing - if you don't want the Big Bad Laity to dominate the discourse on these matters...speak up. Do your jobs.
On the fringe however people like Ann Barnhardt who continue to point out that the irregularities in Benedict's resignation and the irregularities in the election of Pope Francis are insisting that that legally he is not the pope. She is now posting on Rumble with all the other conspiracy theorists who got thrown off of youtube for non pc opinion.
Sigh.'
update: Cardinal Sarah's discussion of the problem is translated and posted here,
