Phil Star Article: No don't blame all the money supposed to be used for flood control that disappeared, it is the heavy rains causing this.
Actually we have had heavy rain/thunderstorms almost every day so this is true.
and now maybe a typhoon is coming:
MANILA, Philippines — The massive flooding that hit parts of the country was caused not only by issues involving flood control projects, but also by the unprecedented volume of rain brought by recent weather disturbances, President Marcos said yesterday.
After a situation briefing with Central Luzon local officials in San Fernando, Pampanga, Marcos said heavy rains had overwhelmed the country’s flood management programs.
Marcos noted that the government is also eyeing long-term flood control projects, including the construction of river dams in Nueva Ecija and a long dike that could extend to Bataan.e.
Al Jazeera's Jamela Alindogan reports from the northern Philippines, where inundated communities are demanding answers. Residents say they are ready for the potential for monsoon flooding, but are angry that flood control measures they say were paid for seemingly do not work. pic.twitter.com/eeQ3mXcAQU
WATCH: Barangay officials found undersized and allegedly substandard steel bars in a damaged flood-control project in Claudio Salgado, Sablayan, Occidental Mindoro.
Several sections collapsed last week following continuous rains brought by the southwest monsoon or Habagat. | via… pic.twitter.com/3PaSyuGiSO
but it's not corruption, garbage blocking the sewers and drainage systems, or the substandard flood control projects that used shoddy cheap construction instead of paying for decent materials and construction: It's climate change. DUH.
The floods that submerged many parts of Luzon due to the southwest monsoon are indeed a result of climate change, as President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Monday stressed that these are not only due to anomalous flood control projects.https://t.co/l30POY0bwg
The rains have kept me inside for most of the last week, so I have been listening to podcasts etc.
Well that will increase your paranoia.
Example one: the Covid coverup is slowly crumbling.
Covid conspiracy was real??
this is of course an ongoing story and the worse part?? that the major medical journals haven't corrected their misinformation.
Then you have this scandal.
so where are the stories about this? Who knows. Probably the same place that ignores the sex trafficking of street kids in poor countries.
And then you have the ongoing story of the casting couch in Hollywood;
the part of the discussion about seducing a kid you raised is of course about Woody Allen. But it reminded me of Tale of Genji: He kidnaps a young girl and raises her and then "marries her" and it is clear that the girl was raped/traumatized.
Nothing new under the sun I guess...
another story being ignored: That China is being aggressive against the Philippines and Viet Nam in the West Philippine sea.
The situation in the South China Sea is becoming more difficult for China because the Philippines has implemented measures to reduce the Chinese threat by curbing corrupt Chinese influence in the country. That is the main reason why the new Filipino government is canceling three Chinese-financed railroad construction projects worth nine billion dollars. ....The cancellation of these projects has been under consideration for over a year due to vague loan terms and China's failure to perform. The Chinese are believed to be using the loan program as a weapon to coerce the Philippines into making concessions in the South China Sea.
A national opinion survey conducted at the end of June found that Filipinos trusted the United States, Australia and Japan the most while trusting China and Russia the least. ... Until China expanded its “lost territory” claims to the South China Sea nearly two decades ago. China was seen as a potential ally of, and investor in, the Philippines.
Despite numerous Filipino diplomatic efforts, China refused to compromise on its claims.
at this point, China is seen as the greatest threat to the Philippines, especially since the Chinese appear to have additional claims on Filipino territory and independence as a nation.
They will try to claim Luzon as part of China if not stopped...
however, the country whose risk from Chinese expansion is usually ignored: Russia. China once owned Siberia and has a lot of workers there who could be a fifth column if invaded. Hence China encouraging Russia in the Ukraine probably has more to do with making Russia weak than in hurting NATO...
the USNavy is having problems on on an aircraft carrier and the peace group mothers are making a fuss, which resulted in moving an aircraft carrier from near VietNam to the Middle East.
Was the kerfuffle by the peace activists that got an exaggerated scandal on an aircraft carrier that caused the USN to remove it from the middle east influenced by Chinese minions in the peace movement?
Who knows.
The USNavy has been having problems for years and it will probably take years to fix it, alas.
and on StrategyPage, many of the essays are about drones. Hmmm... I am just too lazy to keep up with the drone news, but it says a lot that the big beautiful ball room that was politicized to criticize Trump was more about drone attacks on meetings in tents outside the WH than about his vanity, not to mention the need to build a new bunker below the WH a la GreenBrier bunker.
So who is behind the hysteria that distort such obvious news stories
this artificially manufactured virus is a bacteriaphage to eat E Coli.
Wapost explains:
or if you don't have the money to get past their wall you can read it at CIDRAP:
,,, researchers from Stanford University and the Broad Institute report that the functional bacteriophages they created using artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly destroyed strains of Escherichia coli that had evolved resistance to naturally occurring phages, but experts call for safeguards to prevent the technology from being used for harm.
Bacteriophages are ubiquitous viruses that target, infect, and kill only bacteria. They are found everywhere bacteria live, including the environment and the human gut, and they can be used to treat bacterial infections.
...
“Even the simplest genomes are highly complex and can be rendered nonviable by a single mutation,” the authors wrote. “Design at the scale of whole genomes has remained largely beyond reach.”
Urgent biosafety, biosecurity questions
....In an accompanying commentary, Thomas Inglesby, MD, and Moritz Hanke, MD, both of Johns Hopkins University, warn that although the finding is promising, “it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions. The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”
They caution that this technology could be used to create non-therapeutic bacteriophages in eukaryotes such as humans, animals, and plants.
China is sneaking into the Philippine economic zone trying to steal a shoal to make an island, meaning that if this is done thcy could say the entire area is owned by the Chinese.
So I keep an eye on what is going on.
Here is one video about drones:
one thing we have in common with the Ukraine is a bunch of kids who love computer games and other high tech stuff.
Hence Pax Silica, to use the local talent.
of course my youtube channel is full of videos by Chinese trolls complaining, and there are local complaints also probably worrying about it.
The worry about China ignores that China is slowly stealing the resources of the West Philippine se and next step, making one of their islands withing the EEZ off of Luzon.
Note: China has lots of trolls to pretend these things are bad, but China is hated.
heh. illegal mining, like all the farmers who are mining for gold etc in their fields since they can't make a profit since the rich guys import cheap rice that depresses the price.
The church is visited by both Ecuadorian and Colombian pilgrims.
I had visited with my sons 40 years ago. From Pasto we went via bus to Ipialis then hiked over the fields to the northern gorge site. This left us across the gorge from the church, but there is a bridge across the gorge, and on the northern end of the bridge is a small chapel where you can place candles.
this video is very north American bias and emphasizes the Spanish missionaries.
However my son gave a different story about it: the miracle is about an Indian lady carrying her handicapped daughter along the road along the gorge ridge, and suddenly the daughter cried look at the beautiful lady. And the locals made a shrine there. Only later did the missionaries encourage the formal church. And my sons didn't say anything about the image discussed in the video, only about a spring in the bottom of the gorge where people collect water and consider it holy. They hiked down to the bottom (not me: I am not athletic) to visit the area.
This is the story the locals tell, and the locals see it as Our Lady visiting the local people, who were looked down on by the establishment Spanish who ran the place. So it is beloved as a sign Mary loved them and visited them, not as a shrine pushed on them by outside Spanish priests.
such visions are common and usually ignored or debunked by the Catholic church, but locals often place shrines at these areas.
I should note that when traveling down the Pan American highway, we saw a shrine on a hill near the road, and my sons said that the Virgin had appeared there.
Here in the Philippines there are a lot of small Lourdes shines in churches and many have one on their garden and families pray the rosary after dinner. Here she is Mama Mary and folk religion is family oriented, not theological: Mama Mary, Kuya Jesus, and God as father.
I am sure there are a lot of visions of Mama Mary here which are known to family and friends but the church tends to shut them down if they get too enthusiastic.
but the big shrine is along the EDSA where the People Power revolution occurred. Left out of most secular articles, the locals believe that Mama Mary appeared and stopped Marcos Sr's soldiers from shooting the demonstrators, who were praying the rosary and singing hymns.
in the US, one does hear about visions, often in times of stress or sickness, where our Lady or an angel comes with a word of comfort.
In the USA it is common for people to place statues of the virgin in the fields or in the front yards . Our next door neighbor in Pennsylvania, a coalminer, had one in his front garden .
For last 2 days heavy rain and mildly flooded streets.
Not quite a typhoon so no bad winds and we have electricity and city water.
The schools were closed Friday.
The barangay neighborhood patron saint is St Lawrence so fiesta parade later today.and a Miss Gay Gapan contest was scheduled in the plaza for either yesterday evening or today
My arthritis has been bad from the weather so I spent yesterday in bed and didn't attend church in the evening since Catholics have revived the ancient idea that Sunday starts at Sundown.
Howevery arthritis is better today but since l don't have anyone to attend mass with me I will just sit iny room and enjoy the hymns sung by the Baptists who meet in our meeting room each Sunday.
In other news Stella our black dog's 5 puppies are chubby and healthy but their eyes are not open yet so I haven't checked how. many are boys or girls. Their nest is in our closet where I put a flat box for them.
We have another box in my bathroom for Baby our Mama dog but apparently she did not get pregnant last time she was in heat. She is 7 years old so maybe she is too old.
China has been attacking Filipino fishermen for years, even though these fishermen have been fishing in the area for several generations.
But now after Obama refused to help the Philippines to stop China from destroying the ecosystem (green groups silent of course) and building miltarized artificial islands, they are getting more aggressive in recent weeks.
The Radioplane OQ-2 was the first mass-produced unmanned aerial vehicle or drone in the United States, manufactured by the Radioplane Company. A follow-on version, the OQ-3, became the most widely used target drone in US service, with over 9,400 being built during World War II.
the background of the covid epidemic is not just because it came from a lab leak, but that it was a bioengineered virus that was made to be more infectious and more lethal by doing gain of function research.
Gain-of-function research (GoF research or GoFR) is medical research that genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance the biological functions of gene products. This may include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range, i.e., the types of hosts that a microorganism can infect. This research is intended to reveal targets to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics.
and of course it can also be used to bioengineer bioweapons.
Here's why they were so desperate to cover up the lab leak:
The 2003 SARS outbreak exposed how outdated WHO's disease rules were, since the old International Health Regulations only covered a few named diseases. In response, the World Health Assembly launched a revision…
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) July 29, 2026
...
,,,
Gain of function research was behind Covid...
GOF research had been outlawed by Obama but then he allowed it again a few weeks before Trump took office... and it has been outlawed on and off since then... an article last week said Trump outlawed it again, which I wondered about since he had outlawed it already.
But there are always holes and using money via NGOs... for example, the HHS stopped funding Ecohealth which was behind the covid funding leak, but an Ecohealth biolab proposed for the Philippines was not funded by HHS but the Dept of Defense (the Phil Govt refused so the grant has since expired).
on my blog I was criticizing an LATImes article on bird flu that defended the need to do gain of function research. I will put the LAT in italics to separate it from my comments
Why scientists say we are fighting H5N1 bird flu with one hand tied behind our backs
By Susanne Rust and Karen Kaplan Dec. 24, 2024 3 AM PT
Gain-of-function research became controversial during the COVID-19 pandemic. But without it, “we’re just flying in the dark” when it comes to H5N1, said Felicia Goodrum, a molecular virologist at the University of Arizona....But when, where and how that could come to pass is hard to predict — in part, some researchers say, because of guardrails the federal government has placed around gain-of-function research.
I commented that bird flu is scary because of the high mortality in the few times it has spread to humans from birds (but no human to human transmission yet)... but as I point out, what is not known is how many people got it and never saw a doctor because they weren't sick enough to do so. CDC report on 71 human cases showed 2 deaths.
Many of the known bird flu deaths were in rural third world countries where people are in close contact with the free range chickens, or what I suspect was actually from what we in the Philippines call double dead meat, i.e. instead of killing sick animals, the owner sells them to local markets... (the protocol insists you kill and destroy infected chickens for this reason).
To some, the timing couldn’t be worse. At least 65 people in the U.S. have been infected with H5N1 since it arrived in North America in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
65 cases in four years. Got it.
Most of the cases have involved workers on dairy and poultry farms, and their symptoms — including conjunctivitis and upper respiratory irritation — have tended to be mild. But in two cases, people have become severely ill, including a person in Louisiana and a teenager in Canada.
so two very sick people in four years but no deaths. Out of 65 cases in four years. But how many people got the disease and never sought medical care or were diagnosed?
well, anyway if you don't do such research you might not be able to develop a vaccine (China released Sinovax quite quickly because they knew the genome. How did the know the genome so fast? Duh).
Well as a doc, I worry about this because the paranoia over this scandal will result in people refusing known vaccines that have been around for decades and known to save lives, and people will die of these diseases.
Yes, I have seen children in Africa die of measles, whooping cough, tetanus. And my husband was old enough to remember smallpox when he worked in the southern Philippines.
all of these vaccines have a very low but real problem with side effects, mainly sore arm but also more serious problems like brain damage.
when the risk is low, lives are saved. And yes everything has a risk: I often pointed out to my patients that even driving their car to the clinic was risky.
Covid killed several of our neighbors who were young (elders die all the time so may not have had covid). But none of the various vaccines worked very good: Not the Sinovax, not the Sputnik, not tne AZ and not the mRNA vaccine.
Ironically, it was God who stopped the high death rate by having covid morph into the omicron varient that had a low death rate.
All I read in the MSM is how Trumpieboy is losing in Iran and how this is making him unpopular.
then I read that Hamas has promised to disarm and let the board of peace take over Gaza, and another deal with Iranian leaders (who alas don't control the crazies).
Of course, all the negative press coverage repeating talking points has nothing to do with this. And the background is missing or again talking points that have to do with party politics. Well, duh.
“From Camp David, President Trump framed a reported Hamas disarmament agreement as a breakthrough enabled by pressure on Iran, arguing the regional strategic terrain has shifted. The episode highlights two developments presented as unprecedented: Hamas agreeing to disarm and Israel and Lebanon resuming talks after three decades, both attributed to cutting off Iranian funding for proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Kokinda claims the decisive “weapon” was Treasury action under Secretary Scott Bessent—sanctions, OFAC tools, anti–money laundering measures—described as “economic fury,” including designating over 1,000 Iranian-linked individuals, ships, and companies and disrupting routes through shipping, insurance, and offshore finance.
The script also points to the February 19, 2026 launch of the multinational “Board of Peace,” tasked with rebuilding Gaza, as a preplanned institutional blueprint that helped secure the Hamas agreement.”
and also: unlike the crazies on the left and right, Trump recognizes that most Muslims and Muslim countries have a long history of commerce and trade, so would willingly chose peace since the crazy terrorist movements kill more pious Muslims than gentiles.
