Stories behind the headlines

StrategyPage has another report on the background why radical Muslim terrorism against other Muslims and non Muslims.

so why is the story ignored in the west?

 Christians in countries with Moslem majorities, or large minorities, are having a difficult time getting the rest of the world to recognize that most (as in about 80 percent) of the religious violence (not counting Islamic terrorism) in the world is carried out against Christians and most of the violence is committed by Moslems. This is because the Islamic world, while unable to do much in terms of economic, scientific, or cultural progress, or even govern themselves effectively, have proven quite adept at convincing leaders and media organizations in the West that Islam is not the aggressor and is actually the victim...

Currently, you find Moslems attacking Buddhists in Thailand, Jews everywhere, Baha'is in Iran, and Christians in Egypt, Iraq, the Philippines, Pakistan, Malaysia, and elsewhere. Islam does not discriminate when it comes to religious violence, and most Moslems killed because of religious violence are killed by fellow Moslems over religious differences within the Islamic community. Usually its Sunni extremists (like al Qaeda or ISIL) killing Shia (or any other sect that deviates from strict Sunni interpretations of Islamic law and religious customs). 

one of the subplots in Jenkin's book on "The Lost History of Christianity" is about not just the Jews and Christians and Buddhists flourishing under the Caliphate, but the periodic massacres and persecutions.

But the western elite are so busy pushing their theories of Christianity with a married Jesus that few bother to recognize these churches ever existed.

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another untold story: in the Financial Times: The rise of Christianity in China.

The article is a good report on what is going on there, including pointing out the economic and political implications of this.
 read the whole thing.

Summary: actually Christianity has been there since the Syriac days 1300 years ago, and was revived when the Jesuits went there 400 years ago, but never mind: It's a big country.
The problem however isn't with the poor rural Christians of the past but because many new converts to Christianity are urban educated elites. And Protestant Christianity stresses individualism and human right.( Think Milton and the Puritans taking over England from a corrupt king and you can see the danger.) The protestant ethic against corruption and insistence on honesty also has huge implications, (not only in China but in places like the Philippines where the middle class is turning protestant, and in Korea.)

Jenkins covers the trend in his book The Next Christendom.

the bad news? The new leader in China Xi is behind a campaign to wipe them out.

Wonder if anyone told President Obama?

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Did you read about the massacre of 40 students in Mexico?

AustinBay  has the background. 

There are two reasons the crisis could damage Pena's own ability to govern.
Reason no. 1: Atrocities far less hideous and institutionally debilitating than the Iguala Massacre have sparked mass revolt. This column's first sentence sketches reason no. 2: Mexican government corruption facilitates organized crime. Organized crime enriches a corrupt political class. Cartel gunmen and crooked cops on the streets, cartel comandantes and corrupt politicos through institutions ensnare the Mexican people.

The students, according to a NYTimes article in the Manila bulletin, went to a Maxist school and planned a protest, But as Bay points out, the government is run by the radical socialist party


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The photo on the front of today's Manila Bulletin is about our nurses worrying about ebola.

Our peacekeepers arrived back from Liberia over the weekend, and have been put into a 21 day quarrantine, but some are worried.

we only have peacekeepers and OFW there: China has lots of investments there (and sent some medical help in the past few weeks).

so are they  worried?
like the US, they seem to be keeping reports of their possible infections out of the press.

Americans probably know most of their businesses are owned by outsiders, but they don't seem to be aware of how many Asians work in the troubled area. From Wikipedia: Most of the local businesses are run by those whose ancestors were Lebanese or India but the Chinese have arrived to work in agriculture. And a lot of workers are from nearby African countries.

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Belmont club says the elites will coopt religion to push green ideas.

the marxist types in the Catholic church here already have switched to pushing the green agenda, including stopping US rice donations after one of our periodic disasters because the rice from the US might be GM rice. They also are pushing organic growing. We grow brown rice, so no problem, but the dirty little secret is that this is fine for the elites in Manila, but the local poor end up eating imported rice from vietnam and onions from China because we are not self sufficient.

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update: AlJ reports US is getting friendlier with Iran.

I agree with this but unless the president starts making friends with both sides of the aisle in Congress, he will run into more trouble. And the Benghazi coverup, which was about hiding smuggling Ghadaffy's weapons to Syrian rebels via Turkey, hasn't helped matters, and with a Republican congress, the US MSM might actually notice what went on there.

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update: MomJones points out how the ebola epidemic will cause famine.

Family news

Chano and family still at meeting. Nono from the farm is sleeping here for our protection. The dogs, even George the killer lab, know him because he used to work here when younger.

My cat Blackie has been ailing and getting sicker for the last month, and went into a seizure ?tetanus ? hypocalcemic tetany? with hyperextension. Took him to the vet to be put to sleep when it didn't stop. She didn't think it was rabies. Sigh. We raised him since he was a kitten.

That leaves us with two small black cats, plus two black kittens, not yet weaned, plus Pepper, Ruby's beloved huge tomcat. We have to have cats to keep down the mice, and one of the black cats is a bit feral/unfriendly but a good mouser; the other sleeps on our bed.

Lolo is well.

The wall is down but the propaganda continues

I mentioned the communist propaganda machine against western and church health care in my previous post.

SciFi writer Sarah Hoyt has an article on it HERE including the talking points of that "religion" that is still believed among those in cloud cukooland aka PC academia

She writes: from an ESR post which you should definitely read in its entirety:

• There is no truth, only competing agendas.

• All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

• There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

• The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

• Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

• The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

• For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

• When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

and then MsHoyt goes on to explain why she is immune to the mindset.

heh. Sounds familiar. MsHoyt grew up in Portugal, not in the elite bubble. Nothing like some time in the trenches to know these talking points are nonsense. I mean, I read Chomsky and was impressed, until I compared his ideas to reality, at which point I figured he had never actually visited the places he discusses.

The left in the US continue these ideas in their talking points.

They will celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall, but ignore that it was Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul the Great who actually nurtured the movements that did it PEACEFULLY.

My only comment on Furguson is that so many groups so quickly got organized that I suspect they had been given their marching orders (to get out the black vote for the midterm elections) that they were already prepared: if it wasn't the Brown shooting, it would be another one.

Too bad the forensic evidence backs the cop's story. everyone can watch CSI and NCI and Bones, and can evaluate the forensic evidence on their own.

Vaccine hysteria

There are rumors floating around the "conservative" Catholic blogosphere about the Catholic bishops in Kenya claiming that a World health organization push to vaccinate women is using a vaccine with "HCG" that will make them infertile.

One only has to wonder about these people, who seem to be getting more paranoid with a new "liberal" pope. Why hasn't it hit the "Human rights" folks in the liberal Catholic  blogosphere? Maybe because too many of them, like myself, actually have hands on experience in the third world hellholes.

Well, the story has hit "GetReligion", and they wonder why the press hasn't picked up on the story, especially since the bishops claim they had the vaccine tested and it shows contamination.

reality check:
These rumors are not unusual: usually in the past they were spread by the communist disinformation machine to discredit western aid groups or Christian, especially catholic, medical care.

Now they seem to be spread by the rabid Islamicist mullahs who read stories about polio vaccine spreading HIV or measles vaccine killing children in the UKGuardian, and voila, years later they repeat the same lies (and get ridiculed by an anti Muslim press) but the result of all this hysteria is to  get health care workers killed by the Taliban and children dying from these diseases.

These anti HCG vaccines were in phase one testing back in the 1990s and nothing came of it: indeed, a quick check of the literature shows most of the articles date before 1994.

 but a quick search of the medical literature shows... two new articles this year about early testing.

this article

mentions the early testing:

 International Committee for Contraception Research played a historic role in testing its immunogenicity, safety and reversibility in women in Finland, Sweden, Chile and Brazil. The Population Council also conducted valuable long-term studies (5 years) in New York in 63 rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the lack of pathological consequences of antibodies cross-reactive with species luteinizing hormone. The first-ever efficacy trials on a birth control vaccine established high efficacy (one pregnancy in 1224 cycles) of anti-hCG antibodies at and above 50 ng/mL titers. Fertility was regained in the immediate next cycle, at titers falling below 35 ng/mL. A recombinant vaccine, hCGβ-LTB, has been made, which is highly immunogenic in mice. It is due to undergo toxicology studies prior to resumption of clinical trials. An additional utility of this vaccine is likely in advanced-stage terminal cancers expressing hCG/subunits.

and this article

 Vaccines based on GnRH have found application in immuno-castration of male pigs for prevention of boar-taint. Vaccines based on zona pellucida glycoproteins have shown promising results for population management of wild horses and white-tailed deer. Phase II clinical trials in women with β-human chorionic gonadotropin (β-hCG)-based contraceptive vaccine established proof of principle that these can be developed for human application. Block in fertility by β-hCG contraceptive vaccine was reversible. Further research inputs are required to establish the safety of contraceptive vaccines, improve their immunogenicity and to develop novel vaccine delivery platforms for providing long lasting immunity.

What has changed in 20 years is the ability to get a better immune response by combining the first vaccine with a second toxin or vaccine.

My take on the HCG vaccine continues to be that this is an urban legend, since these studies are still in their early phases.

But this brings up another question: Who made the vaccines? Problems with counterfeit medicines is a huge problem in the third world....and if the vaccines are contaminated, either accidentally or deliberately, there will be a paper trail.

The problem? It wouldn't be the first time that third world women were used as guinea pigs by the rich western elites.

So why give mainly women of childbearing age the vaccine? Well, the problem is neonatal tetanus.

the local midwife cuts the cord with unsterilized scissors, or the mom puts local herbs or clay on the drying cord. (unlike the US, usually the cord is left long: often 2 to 3 inches long, with multiple ties for safety).

The tetanus germs has spores, so often contaminates the herbs or cutting materials to give people the disease. Hence the stress on giving people tetanus shots if cut with a dirty knife.

Some of these kids develop neonatal tetanus, a terrible disease that even with medicine kills half of them.

So we routinely gave out tetanus shots in our prenatal clinic. When mom has antibodies against tetanus, she "gives" them to her newborn child, who is then immune for awhile to the disease.

But in some countries, there are not enough clinics or trained midwives, so the disease continues. Hence the vaccine push.

The result of this kerfuffle will be dead kids, similar to the kids dying of whooping cough and measles in the "first world", or the kids dying of polio and measles because some half educated Mullah has read the anti vaccine stuff in the UKGuardian and forbids his people to let their kids get shots. In Pakistan, this has resulted in the Taliban killing medical workers.

So my take is that this is an urban legend, but some third party does need to look into it before more kids die.

Stuff below the fold

The UKTelegraph has an article on what the average soldier carried to the various wars of the last milleneum.

All of them seem to carry sox, and today's soldier carries an iPhone instead of chess sets or dice that were carried in past wars.

The First World war is not a big deal in the USA, which celebrates Veteran's day, but in the UK it is called Poppy day and is still remembered by those who lost family in the war.



anti war sentiment was fashionable after the war, but one wonders what the result would have been if Germany had won.

opinion one:

a stronger Germany would have fought another war for lebensraum and to rule the world.

Opinion two

fascism in France and England, and Germany would end up fighting Russia anyway. The isolationist US would not have fought in Europe, but would have ended up with a war in an expanding Japan anyway.



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HELLO President Snow. The first reviews are in for the Hunger Games: Mockingjay part one.

mixed reviews since much of it takes place in dull, regimented District 13...

but most of the folks at RottenTomatoes liked it.

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Right in time for the 100th anniversary of World War I, there is now a film inspired by the classic book Testament of Youth.

For those of you who are older, you might remember it was a  BBC/ PBS miniseries back in the 1980's which can now be watched on YOUTUBE.

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And if you missed the decline and fall of the Roman empire, you can look forward to Isaac Asimov's recasting the story as futuristic sci fi in Foundation.

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Glamourous Geeks

Happy Birthday Hedy Lamar

wikipedia commons

most famous for her nude scenes, she actually had a brain on her shoulders:

The topic of their conversations soon turned to radio-controlled torpedoes, a key WWII weapon that could be easily detected and jammed by broadcasting interference. Harnessing the torpedo knowledge she acquired from the meetings she attended with her former husband, Lamarr began collaborating with Antheil on frequency hopping, a method for rapidly switching among random synchronized frequencies.
The pair's plan was to use a piano roll to randomly switch the signal sent from the control center to the torpedo in short bursts among 88 frequencies, much like the 88 keys on a piano's keyboard. The pair's "Secret Communications System" was granted US Patent No. 2,292,387 in 1942, but the technique was never adopted by the military during the war.
The patent resurfaced in the 1950s while private companies were developing a wireless technology called CDMA. Lamarr's method is still in use today by cell networks, Bluetooth devices and Wi-Fi.

Family news

Chano et al still at the meeting.

I am getting the bathrooms in the two guest bedrooms fixed so we can use them. One of the bedrooms is full of storage/junk, the other has my old clothes and some junk and the sofa. We used to sit in there in the afternoons to read, just to get out of the bedroom, but now we mainly use the bathroom for our nursing kittens, to keep them away from the dogs.

One of the toilets will need replacing for a cracked tank, the other one just needed new gaskets.

We're using our handiman Ferdie: He has been working for the last year in Manila and has just come back and needs some money and asked if we had jobs for him to do. Yes, lots of jobs in our house, which tends not to be repaired much. Sigh. Long story.

follow the money

Francis tries to clear out the Augean stables of the Vatican Bank/finances.

In truth, the Vatican’s history of financial scandal is only to a limited extent related to occasional acts of brazen corruption. More often, it’s a product of a culture in which all sorts of objectively suspect behaviors aren’t even seen as problematic — steering contracts to friends or relatives instead of abiding by a competitive bidding process, for instance, or not asking a monsignor where the wads of cash come from that he wants to park in his Vatican bank account.

Hmm...sounds like the Philippines.

The culture of the third world is similar to that described in the article, so blame Italy, not religion.

Of course, sometimes this is an advantage: There are rumors that the Vatican kept Solidarity alive during the early 1980's, ultimately causing the fall of communism. Where did that money come from? Catholic donations? The Mafia? The CIA? The diocese of Chicago's missing funds?

Family news

Chano and Joy are preparing to leave for a government sponsored food conference on organic farming. They will take Ruby with them. We are arranging for one of the men from the farm to sleep here at night for protection (the cook goes home at night and the maid sleeps upstairs). No, there isn't much crime here, but in the last two years there have been two murder/thefts nearby at night, when the victim was alone because family was elsewhere.

Lolo no longer has his guns, so all we have is a crowbar,  Roach spray (with a long nozzle for better targeting) and George, the killer Lab.

we also have two old dogs who sleep in our bedroom, plus some cats. The feral black cat, Pantera, still has her kittens in Lolo's closet, and when I tried to move them, she took them back. So instead, I removed his clothing from the shelf where she has her nest.

Hamster post of the day

Grubstreet.com has tweetphotos of Japan's hamster bartender.

This is Ginja, the fluffy manager of a cozy little izakaya somewhere in Yachiyo, Japan. Like any izakaya, sake and snacks are plentiful, but unlike most izakayas, Ginja is a hamster and his refreshments are made of plastic and come from mini-toy-maker Re-Ment. Head of social media for the restaurant/Ginja's owner Kosuke Sato has nonetheless amassed a loyal virtual following by using the premise to pretty comedic, mini-Cheers-style effect — it also helps that the hamster is really photogenic.

via Lightreading

Bat Room

no, not for Batman but how Okies recycle to make houses for lonely bats.

From Dustbury:

Stuff around the web

So a pesky bishop is demoted by the "can't we all get along" pope.

Uh Oh...

actually, I knew several who belonged to the order in Liberia... one was a nun who traveled to distant villages to diagnose and treat Hanson's disease (aka leprosy).

Did you know they have their own ambassadors and passports? And I am bemused that the press is mixing up Malta the island, and this group, whose headquarters is no longer in that island.

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Colon cancer rates in young people increasing, says the NYTimes.
but most of the article is hinting that this doesn't mean you should get a colonoscopy at a younger age (hint: because it would cost too much for our government budget).

The study draws no conclusions about whether screening should begin at a younger age. “There are always risks and unintended consequences of screening tests,” said the senior author, Dr. George J. Chang, an associate professor of surgery and health services research at the University of Texas.

When I was first in medical school, half of these cancers were within the reach of a finger...or a simple sigmoidoscopy. Now only a small percent are.

We didn't see any cases in east Africa, where high fiber diet is used, but it is common in some west African countries and here in the Philippines (blame the low fiber rice diet? neither country eats a lot of meat, which is blamed for the cases in the USA). And the rate is high in Europe but also in Oceania and Japan.

So there is probably a dietary input in the disease, yet one wonders why, with the emphasis on high fiber diets, the disease is found in younger and younger patients...

and there are families where it is genetic...we had one family with this gene, and we found a pre cancerous polyp in a 7 year old...

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The Once and Future King...drama on BBCRadio.

headsup BrianSibley

When we lived in Africa, we used to listen to these dramas, but nowadays, it is easier to download and listen on our mp3 player.

I still have my old SW/FM/AM radio but I gave it to Joy, since it is a siemens and powerful enough for her to listen to her radio stuff from Manila on the 2nd floor...here, because of the concrete, I need a long antenna, and it's just not worth it.

Remember those who quietly help

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Gustavo Gonzalez 

via Blackfive:

U.S. Marines and U.S. Public Health Service members return during Operation United Assistance at Roberts International Airport in Monrovia, Liberia, Oct. 31, 2014. The operation is providing command and control, logistics, training and engineering support to the U.S. government’s efforts to contain the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. 

Ebola news

I linked earlier to a StrategyPage podcast about the military fighting Ebola in Africa,  but today's link is noting that the Public Health Service Commissioned corps is being sent there too.

President Obama has assured Americans that none of the nearly 4,000 U.S. troops heading to Liberia will treat Ebola patients, but 70 uniformed officers of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps will.

The corps, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, will open a clinic outside the Liberian capital, Monrovia, this weekend and is tasked with treating Liberian doctors and nurses who contract the deadly disease. It is the first time U.S. government personnel have been given that assignment, although all volunteered.

What took so long?

I worked in the IHS as a PHSCC for a year, and then later as a civilian for 9 years.

the last call up I knew about was when they were sent to give care for the Mariel boat lift.

Until Jimmy Carter closed the public health hospitals in the major port cities, they were tasked to handle sailors etc who entered into the US. Nowadays, most work either on the Indian reservations or in underserved areas.

Podcasts of the week

Mythgard's latest book discussion is about Watership Down.

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InOurTime podcast this week is about Hatsheput

A feminist icon, but the bad news is that, unlike other female Pharaohs, she stole the throne from her stepson, first legally as regent but even later when he was of age. The good news is that she didn't kill him, but this might be because he joined the army to stay far away from her.

Was she as beloved as the feminists claim? One has to take the official reports dubiously (Egyptians tend to report only good news, and then later erase their enemies, which is what happened to her history).

There is a famous X rated graffiti that suggests the common people weren't buying her self proclaimed story of greatness even during her lifetime...

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The trailer for Hobbit 3 is up, and it looks like a bummer. Not as good as the first teaser trailer....

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but Hunger games is the other movie we are waiting for.

Remembering when Freedom won

AustinBay remembers the fall of the Berlin wall 25 years ago.

The Wall's fall mattered for everyone who understood the Cold War's stakes and risks. The stakes were freedom versus tyranny. The Cold War risks in Western Europe were manifold, but they included escalation from a conventional firefight to global thermonuclear war.
Which is why I stress joy and relief. Those were the emotions that flooded me on Nov. 9, 1989, as I saw video of East and West Berliners clasping hands and weeping. Where were the border guards? Berliners said the East German border police had disappeared -- they had refused to shoot. Then the crowd surged. Within a couple of hours, guitars replaced Kalashnikovs. I recall TV footage (the reporter said he was live in East Berlin) of a gleeful young man whacking the Wall with a sledgehammer.

Insomnia downloads of the week

Librivox has a book of Cowboy poems for your listening pleasure.

and Brian Sibley is posting links to the BBC radio series on the Musical.

he has a link to his new book on the Hobbit 3 for pre-order.
When we went to the mall, the ad was up for this movie already, even though it doesn't open until December.

Election comments

Watching the election kerfuffles, it reminds me of the late 1970's and early 1980's, when I lived in Africa: it was like the USA was crazy, with an idealistic president who refused to recognize that idealism not tempered with reality ended up in chaos and defeat (read the famous essay "Children of Light, children of darkness" to explain why...or maybe just Kipling). So the result was too far the other direction. Sigh.

On the other hand, maybe this sends a headsup that the elites cannot impose their laws on people without pushback.

Nah. The big business Republicans will stop that move in it's track.

I am reading about the troubles of the Roman republic, and since the USA is not a democracy but a Republic, with checks and balances based on the Roman republic, I am not optimistic.

On the other hand, just maybe the village idiots will do a better job than the elites who live in cloud-cukoo-land... because the idiots have to live in a reality based world.

Quarrantine?

For later listening: StrategyPage podcast on Ebola.


related item:AmusingPlanet has an article on St Helena's Island, where Napoleon was "quarantined" so he didn't return to Europe to make trouble.

Headsup TeaAtTrianon.

Family news

Since the cook was harvesting her rice, she cooked early and left the dishes to be reheated.

Alas, that early in the day, only old meat was in the palenke from the previous day and the food was lousy.

So when I went to the mall to buy Lolo's medicines, I decided to pick up a bucket of KFC chicken for us to eat, since KFC is near the pharmacy. I haven't eaten there for over six month, and it smelled so good. So we ate the chicken at home for "merienda" (3 pm break).

So far the harvest is okay: No local typhoons to destroy the crop. We are praying the luck continues.

Stuff around the web

Who invented the equals sign?

 Mazur has this to say on the history of the equals sign:

The ideas of algebra brought on the symbols, not the other way around. Robert Recorde had written the words “is equal to” almost two hundred times in his book Whetstone of Witte (1557) before noticing that he could easily “avoid the tedious repetition” of those three words by designing the symbol = to represent them.

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OttomanHistoryPodcast discusses the Jews of North Africa, including a group that is ignored in history, those who lived in the Southern Sahara region who are ethnically different from those Jews who lived along the coast.

alas, I listened to 20 minutes and it all seems to be talking about how the intellectuals view these people rather than about these folks themselves.

 but learning about the ethic groups in the Sahara countries is not something one learned in school. This valley is not Arab but Mozabite (Berber) ethnic group that dates to 1000  acccording to wikipedia:Ghardaïa (population of 93,423) is the capital of the confederacy

the town is a UN World heritage site.

© UNESCO
Author: Francis Tack 

so why should we care about this small town?

StrategyPage notes:

 In Ghardaia the violence between Arab and Berber residents is all about water rights, jobs, land, ethnicity and religion. Arabs also accuse the 800,000 Berbers in the south of supporting al Qaeda. The province of Ghardaia is on the edge of the Sahara Desert and contains only 200,000 people. The unrest has been going on since late 2013. Over a hundred people have been arrested and there have been over 400 casualties (including at least 15 dead). Over a hundred building has been burned down along with dozens of vehicles. Thousands have fled the city and many businesses stay closed for days or weeks at a time. The police, who are largely Arab, are accused of being biased against the Berbers. The ethnic tensions in this area, 600 kilometers south of the capital, have been growing since 2008 and there was another outbreak of violence in October 2013 that was put down violently. As bad as the ethnic tensions have been there are also disagreements over religion. The Arabs belong to the Maliki school of Islam while the Berbers are largely from the smaller Ibadi sect.

About 30 percent of Algerians are Berber, but the percentage is higher in the south. Ghardaia is an ancient Berber city of 90,000 that contains many Ibadi shrines. Berbers are found throughout North Africa, west of Egypt and down to the semi-desert Sahel (where the closely related Tuareg tribes live). The six million Berbers of Algeria are considered the most abused in the region. Ghardaia Arabs got the recent unrest started by desecrating some of these shrines. This led to violent Berber reprisals, especially when images of the damage appeared on the Internet. The government is concerned for several reasons. For one thing there are oil fields are nearby. Worse, the sustained unrest among the Berbers could be the first breeze in an uprising that could engulf the entire country.

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Pumpkin pie week at Epicurious blog.

Poverty kaput, and Rice news

All the news from the US is about politics...oh yes, and a famous TV actress who got upset that someone noticed she sexually abused her sister, and who is going to sue the blogger who actually quoted her actual words from her book.

And the foreign news is about the same.

So to put things into perspective, read this article (via Instapundit).

Dartmouth economics professor Douglas Irwin has an excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal — “The Ultimate Global Antipoverty Program,” with the subtitle “Extreme poverty fell to 15% in 2011, from 36% in 1990. Credit goes to the spread of capitalism.” Here’s an excerpt:

The World Bank reported on Oct. 9 that the share of the world population living in extreme poverty had fallen to 15% in 2011 from 36% in 1990. Earlier this year, the International Labor Office reported that the number of workers in the world earning less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 375 million 2013 from 811 million in 1991.

Such stunning news seems to have escaped public notice, but it means something extraordinary: The past 25 years have witnessed the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world.

To what should this be attributed? Official organizations noting the trend have tended to waffle, but let’s be blunt: The credit goes to the spread of capitalism. Over the past few decades, developing countries have embraced economic-policy reforms that have cleared the way for private enterprise.

I've seen this first hand, and it's ignored for the "ain't it awful" stories of the day.

The World bank report on the Philippines 

The proportion of households living below the official poverty line has declined slowly and unevenly from 59 percent in 1961 to below 39 percent in 1991 and around 36 percent in 1994. Urban poverty stood at around 23 percent in 1991 and rural poverty at 53 percent (by World Bank staff calculations). Food poverty (or those living below subsistence) was around 20 percent of households in 1991, but 32 percent of rural households while only 12 percent of urban households. Two-thirds of the poor are engaged in the agriculture, fishery, and forestry sectors and have an elementary school education or less. However, the depth of poverty is relatively small (with the poverty gap index only 17 percent in 1991, having fallen by 40 percent since 1961), and income disparities among the poor have declined noticeably.

if you wonder why "food poverty" is higher in rural areas, it is because often the farmers sell most of their crop for money (for school fees, clothing, etc) at harvest time, and then run out of their personal stash of rice. So "hunger season" is right before the harvest.

What helps is often those who work overseas will send money that is used by the extended family for school fees and small luxuries. And land reform has helped: We own only a small amount of land per person in our family, and the rest is now owned by the local farmers whose families traditionally worked the land.

The problem? Many of them have been able to educate their kids, who prefer to work in Manila or in factory jobs or overseas than to work in the fields for minimum wages. So we often hire farmers from the Visayas, which is not as "affluent" as we are, to farm our fields.

Mechanization has lessened the work. A large rototiller called a handplow helps prepare the fields, and although the seedlings are still planted by hand and the harvest is still by hand, once the rice is cut, we have a thresher to separate the grain from the stalks. The grain is then dried, usually in the sun. So you have to drive slowly on the roads because of the rice drying there. But if it rains, more rice is lost, or you have to pay someone to dry it for you. We lost part of a harvest this way when it took too long for the local rice mill to dry our crop. The rice was edible, but we are a gourmet rice grower so we had to sell a lot of it for regular rice consumption.

So three years ago we bought a small rice mill and a small rice drier, and placed them on the top of a hill where we had the chicken farm.

Then we were hit by the typhoon last year (not Yolanda: a smaller class 4 that hit Luzon and got crowded out of the headlines by the larger typhoon in the south). That destroyed the chicken farm and much of our big crop, but the buildings for the drier did okay.

We get two harvests a year here, and there is irrigation. The main harvest rarely needs irrigation, so you make a larger profit, but the winter harvest requires irrigation so is smaller and less profit due to irrigation fees.

Places like Viet Nam get three harvests a year, so their rice is cheaper than ours. The trick is to flood the fields and plant partly grown seedling as soon as the harvest is done, so the growing season is shorter.

Whereas here, the main crop is planted as seedlings, but the "second harvest" is often just grown from seeds that are thrown out into the furrows by hand. Less labor intensive since it is a "spare" harvest.

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Our cook is taking the day off to help harvest her family's rice fields.

Joy has made us organic, which has increased our expenses, but not improved our yields (and alas a lot of our competition cheats a bit to lower the cost so we are being harmed by the competition).

The latest initiative here is to lower methane emissions caused by wet rice fields. You keep slowly running water in the rice paddies to keep down weed growth. But the rotting weeds emit methane, a green house gas.

PDF LINK

another article explains.

Alternate wetting and drying is an agricultural practice whereby farmers allow their rice paddies to dry until the water table is below the soil surface before irrigating again. Compared with maintaining paddies in a continuously flooded state, this practice can lower water use by 25 per cent, and reduce energy use for pumping the irrigation water.
AWD also reduces methane emissions from rice production by 50 per cent or more because periodically aerobic soil conditions inhibit methane-producing soil bacteria.

One reason for China's success is lowering greenhouse gas emissions was that they implemented this practice (making me laugh at the naive westerners who didn't even mention this when they praised China's green policies).

Which brings me to another old story that hit the papers: Arsenic in your rice cereal.

duh. This is an older NYTimes article on the problem.

If the fields are flooded in the traditional paddy method, she has found, the rice handily takes up arsenic. But if the water is reduced in an effort to limit arsenic, the plant instead absorbs cadmium — also a dangerous element.
“It’s almost either-or, day-and-night as to whether we see arsenic or cadmium in the rice,” said Dr. Guerinot, a molecular geneticist and professor of biology at Dartmouth College.
The levels of arsenic and cadmium at the study site are not high enough to provoke alarm, she emphasized. Still, it is dawning on scientists like her that rice, one of the most widely consumed foods in the world, is also one of nature’s great scavengers of metallic compounds.
Consumers have already become alarmed over reports of rice-borne arsenic in everything from cereal bars to baby food. Some food manufacturers have stepped up screening for arsenic in their products, and agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration now recommend that people eat a variety of grains to “minimize potential adverse health consequences from eating an excess of any one food.”
But it’s not just arsenic and cadmium, which are present in soil both as naturally occurring elements and as industrial byproducts. Recent studies have shown that rice is custom-built to pull a number of metals from the soil, among them mercury and even tungsten. The findings have led to a new push by scientists and growers to make the grain less susceptible to metal contamination.
The highest levels often occur in brown rice, because elements like arsenic accumulate in bran and husk, which are polished off in the processing of white rice. The Department of Agriculture estimates that on average arsenic levels are 10 times as high in rice bran as in polished rice.

So Organic brown rice has it's own problems.

But the good news: Philippine rice is arsenic free.

The samples were analyzed using an inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometer (ICP-OES),and their arsenic levels were below the ICP-OES detection limit of 15 parts per billion (ppb).  
The Philippines has not yet set a maximum limit of arsenic in rice. Australia and New Zealand (1000 ppb total arsenic in cereals) and China (150 ppb inorganic arsenic for rice and rice products) have set limits.  
The global “normal” range for arsenic concentration in rice is 80-200 ppb. A study by Yamily Zavala and John Duxbury at Cornell University in New York revealed that arsenic concentrations in rice from the US and Europe were similar (198 ppb), and significantly higher than rice from Asia (70 ppb).
The Cornell study showed that arsenic-contaminated irrigation water, not soil, led to increased grain arsenic concentration. As rice is grown in flooded soils, it absorbs and stores a lot more arsenic compared to other plants through its roots.

The other church at Ground Zero

A lot of folks are aware of the Episcopal church near Ground Zero that was spared in the fires that resulted from the plane hijackings.

But fewer are aware that a nearby Orthodox church was destroyed. And now, FatherZ writes, they will rebuild it.

videolink

The cranky film review of the day

"Frozen" as the Shining. 
You'll notice the characters who meet their icy demise at the ends of these movies don't match up. Because love. When Anna sacrifices herself to save Elsa—despite the fact that Elsa almost killed her twice—she is able to save them both, teaching Elsa that love can conquer a cold death and help her control her dangerous wintery outbursts.
I mean, it's not "The Shining," y'all. It's Disney's "The Shining." So, Kristoff doesn't get an ax plunged into his chest, Olaf doesn't have to face "Heeeeere's Johnny!" and Anna and Elsa and Olaf and everyone can live happily ever after.

Am I the only one who thinks that Elsa is a narcisstic bitch? And if you think that love conquers all, maybe you are living in a fairly tale.

One clue that a movie isn't quite up to speed is putting a brand name on the film...so it's "Disney's Frozen" although Disney has been dead for 50 years.

Haloween customs

From the Smithsonian

Kale as matchmaker

Meet the Cromartie Fool, the goofy man holding a kale stock. According to Celtic tradition, it was believed that this jester presided over Halloween festivities—many of which involved single men and women uprooting kale stalks to determine their future. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.


Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-halloween-tradition-best-left-dead-kale-as-matchmaker-100207686/#EXuYqlcPp2WfiMZz.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

Via TeaAtTrianon:

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BBC on the UK's Haloween and Winter customs

There are men who carry flaming barrels of tar through a Devon village, folk who pour cider over apple tree roots and cross-dressing troupes who perform something called Soul Caking to ward off evil spirits.
There is also a village in Somerset called Hinton St George which has a tradition of pumpkin carving and night-time walks that sounds remarkably similar to the Halloween rituals we all know.

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Family News

Sunday is All Saints day, when we remember the dead.

Here in the Philippines, it means that everyone takes off for a long weekend to go to their home villages and check the graves of their ancestors, cleaning them up from debris and decorating them with candles and flowers.

Usually the family stays for a picnic lunch, and there are plenty of vendors around with cold drinks, snacks, and toys for bored children to play with.

Since it is also hot, I suggested to Lolo that we go today. Tomorrow and Sunday will see so many people in the cemetary that we won't get near the gravesites of his mother and relatives, and indeed, usually the roads are blocked for cars. Last year, we got a tricycle to get Lolo inside, since he can't walk well, but since it's been either hot or thunderstorms, I suggested we go a day early so his son can drive the car right to the grave.

The main problem of going early is that the local kids will steal the flowers to sell to other visitors.

But I figure the dear departed won't mind, since it's the thought that counts,  especially since the cousins will bring more flowers etc. in the next two day.

Because of the heat, instead of eating at the grave, on the way home, we stopped at Luz for lunch, despite the fact we were a bit sweaty and grungy from the trip. Oh well...they know us.

Craft item of the day

How to make a medieval costume in five minutes

Download of the day

Download of the day is Michael Drouts's Encyclopedia on JRR Tolkien.

and if you use the search, the archives also has some of the series on Middle Earth.


they also have a torrent for the desolation of Smaug.

Quick before the copyright cops find it's there.

Stuff round the net

Nice Story of the day:

He takes a picture of her everywhere he goes.

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Nice story of the past:

Usually the love stories in the Tudors seem a bit nasty, but Henry's sister did marry for love

Headsup TeaAtTrianon

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ten things that are killing the family....

it's not all "morality"...some sociological and economic things are destroying the family.

the stress on the extended family being destroyed by moving into the suburbs is obvious, but rarely noted as a problem.
An extension of this:
Mens' wages went down, so we live in an economy that made it necessary for women to work full time jobs, and these jobs are often far from home.

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The angry nurse who claimed that she was placed in quarantine after her forehead tested as having a fever has been released.

She is returning to Maine, but her neighbors there don't want her to break quarantine, as she is saying she plans to do.

Most of the studies have been done comparing forehead strips with oral or TM (placed in the ear) measurment of temperature in kids, for obvious reasons: Kids bite thermometers, mouth breathe, and refuse to cooperate.

but in this nurse's,case, they just aimed a temperature measuring gun at her head (which is how we were screened for SARS and influenza at Manila airport).

and although that screening will usually pick up fevers, with few false negatives it also greatly overestimates temperatures. Which means you have to rescreen (just as you have to be checked if the metal detecter goes off, or if your luggage tests positive for explosives because you had fertilized your garden the day you packed your suitcase).

from a scienceblogs article:

The bottom line is that this kind of remote fever sensing had poor positive predictive value, meaning that the proportion of people correctly identified as having fever was low, ranging from 10% to 16%. Thus there were a lot of false positives. Negative predictive value, the proportion of people classified by the IR device as not having fever who in fact did not have fever was high (97% to 99%), so not many people with fevers will be missed with the IR device. Predictive values depend not only on the accuracy of the device but also how prevalent fever is in the screened population. In the early days of a pandemic, fever prevalence will be very low, leading to low positive predictive value. The false positives produced at airport security would make the days of only taking off your shoes look good.

but of course, instead of using her predicament to educate the public on the proper way to screen passengers (i.e. anyone testing positive should be pulled aside an the temperature rechecked), she is suing.

Kaching alert....

The problem is that the feds are so mixed up no one knows anything...or rather we know it but they seem to be reneging on the problem.

From SciTechDaily:

Targeted Isolation May Be the Most Effective Way to Reduce Transmission of Ebola

 New research led by the Yale School of Public Health shows that isolating 75% of infected individuals in critical condition within four days of symptom onset has a high chance of eliminating the spread of Ebola.Isolating the most severely ill Ebola patients before the fifth day of their illness may be the most effective way to reduce transmission of the virus, new research led by the Yale School of Public Health suggests.

. The research is published October 28 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. ,,,

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the WAGD from ebola article of the day at Wired..

summary: You are probably safe in East McKeesport, but if it hits Manila we are toast...

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CHOCOLATE!

 Dietary cocoa flavanols—naturally occurring bioactives found in cocoa—reversed age-related memory decline in healthy older adults, according to a study led by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists. 

Family news

Yesterday, we moved the puppies downstairs to the laundry/garage area.
And I bought 20 pounds of puppy food (which we will soak and feed them, but also feed it to the adult dogs mixed with rice).

We have nine surviving puppies: Angel lost two of her five puppies, probably because she is older, but this is good because Sophie had six, and is happy to let Angel share in feeding the kids.

They have just started eating: Here, usually the minute they start solid food, they get given away, but I usually try to keep them for at least another month, because they often die if given away too soon.

The problem? Well, the staff often takes them home behind our back, meaning that the people who were promised puppies often don't get any.

oh well. I'd like to keep one, but we still have too many dogs, so until PapaDog dies (he is about ten years old) we'll have to give them all away. Since we spend time cuddling them, usually the dogs are good natured...and we have no trouble finding them homes.

None of them appear to be "short" like Angel, so they all should be medium sized dogs.

Stuff around the net

The latest school shooting was again in Indian country, like the one at Red Lake a couple of years ago.

Which brings to mind this: DWarren quotes Chaput's speech.

That word, “heartless,” is underused today. It raises the stakes on our idea of “feelings.” We have too many feelings, most of them fake. The genuine ones tend to be quite selfish. We “hurt” easily, we indulge, easily. Empathy and compassion are reduced to “feelings,” and our “concern” is to make the rich pay. The actual poor are subject to our feelings of irritation. When cornered, rhetorically, we may write a cheque, but it becomes a kind of blood money. Living as I do in Parkdale, I am conscious of the ignorance of one street for another, one house for another, one apartment to the apartment next door. I can understand it. I don’t want to know these people, either.
So that my heart breaks — I am “genuinely impressed” — when I see examples of personal outreach to the neighbours. Most often I see this in the form of one rather desperately poor person, spontaneously helping another. Such as offering him a cigarette. (The smuglies in government have made cigarettes expensive.) Such as “being there” when a man is fallen, and not just calling nine-one-one. Such as taking care of the crazies, hands on. Such as — and this is the most impressive thing I’ve seen — teaching a hopeless wretch the use of a rosary. Because that can change everything.

which reminds me of how many of our Native American neighbors took in relatives who needed a place to stay, or raised the children of relatives and friends who had drug problem.

Chaput's full speech about the family synod is here.

And someone took a quote out of context to demand he apologize.

so what else is new?

well, the pope explained that families were important but his statements didn't get much coverage.

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Trig was not the first beloved child who had Down's syndrome.

Angel Unaware

mn.gov/mnddc/parallels2/pdf/.../53-Angel_Unaware.pdf

Minnesota.gov

Angel. Unaware. DALE EVAN S ROGERS

I don't know if the link will work, but this is indeed the wife of cowboy Roy Rogers.

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Family news

Ruby had a lot of friends over in the evening for a movie marathon to celebrate her birthday.

Lolo is wheezing again...but no fever. Might be the allergies/hayfever type syndrome since a couple of kids I saw had allergic rhinitis and cough.

Joy's sister has her week off from her immunotherapy...repeat testing will be Friday.

This is a big weekend: All Saint's day when everyone goes to the cemetaries to clean up the graves of their loved ones, eat a meal, say some prayers. etc.

WTF article of the day take two

LINK

The powerful, feeling-filled bond between a mother and her child is a big part of what leads working mothers to take their child-rearing responsibilities more seriously than working fathers.

If this essential difference is the problem, if it is the root of gender equality in the workplace, and if our highest priority is to eliminate gender inequality, then ectogenesis offers a way forward.

why not? The elites are already outsourcing pregnancy to surrogates in India.

Headsup WSmith 

WTF articles of the day

Nurse who cared for ebola patients and who had high fever but negative test at airport is lamenting her civil right were violated, and that her quarantine is "hell" (according to Drudge).

Well, the blood test may not be positive early in the disease. And after that hippie doc managed to go all around NYCity while feeling sick but didn't worry because his fever hadn't gone up, I don't think she will get much sympathy.

ALL patients arriving from West Africa who were in contact with ebola need to go into quarantine, fever or not.  This could be done at home if they are mature and can monitor their fever at home (or better yet, a nurse can visit them daily to check the temperature). Will that lower the number of "health care workers" who volunteer? Maybe, but I doubt it.

The last time that "civil rights" by narcissists trumped public health was when Mayor Feinstein faced a recall election for closing the San Francisco bath houses where HIV, hepatitis, and other STD's spread like wildfire. How many died because of that bit of nonsense. Indeed, if anyone had closed the bathhouses when the Hepatitis B epidemic was going on in the late 1970's, then a lot fewer men would have caught HIV when it flew in with "patient zero", the attractive Canadian flight attendant who probably caught it in Haiti.

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heh. NJ guv says:

“I have great respect for Dr. Fauci, but what he’s counting on is a voluntary system with folks that may or may not comply,” said Christie, citing the example of an NBC News crew who returned from West Africa and violated their self-quarantine.
“This is government’s job,” Christie said. “If anything else, the government’s job is to protect the safety and health of our citizens.”

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two more comments: The bitching nurse complains that her oral temperature was only 98.6 but only her forehead temperature showed 101 degrees.

Well forehead temperature scanning is not a very good test, but you know it is easy to fake an oral temperature, which can be changed if you drink something cold or hot or even breathe through your mouth. If she really wanted to argue with the high temperature test done, she should have insisted on the most accurate way to check a temperature: A rectal thermometer reading.

As for those who say you can't catch Ebola by sitting next to someone on a bus: True. But what if he coughs in your face, or (worse ) vomits all over you? If that had happened in the doctor who felt ill but didn't have a temperature,so he went all aorund instead of staying quietly at home,  it could have exposed 50 people to the disease.

Family news

Yesterday, they held a birthday party for Ruby and her friends from her church's youth group.

In the evening, we went to Luz restaurant with Lolo to celebrate.

So a busy day.

She lost her old computer in last year's typhoon, so kept borrowing my new computer, so I gave her the  computer for her birthday. (and bought another one for myself).