Dragon talk

Dragons do talk in other folktales, but usually only a few sentences. Smaug however is fluent in Common speech and talks like a British upper class twit.

So, KRu asks: Does Smaug speak Common tongue or does the ring allow Bilbo to understand dragon speech? essay at link.


Left out of the movie: The thrush understand Bilbo, and Bard because of his ancestry, is able to understand the Thrush's language...

For later reading

DavidWarren links to a site that has liturgical book downloads. I checked one and it seems to be basic instructions on what the liturgy means: i.e. how it keeps us holy and close to God.

Pre vatican II of course.

related item: Blessing of the first fruits of the harvest at August 15th mass.


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Heh. StrategyPage says that the USNavy finally is recognizing that being sleepy results in accidents.

This is difficult to implement because lack of sleep and keeping people on duty even when they are obviously having a hard time staying awake, much less alert, has long been taken for granted and accepted as a worthy tradition. It was another one of those difficulties navy personnel had to overcome to become a real sailor. Lots of strong black coffee and resolute leadership was seen as the solution to sleep deprivation problems.
But now the data is making it clear that merchant marine sailors and civilian firms doing similar work (like running nuclear reactors) have become more effective, and less accident prone, by adopting more pragmatic attitudes towards sleep and dealing with fatigue. 

True for doctors too...but it took a dead teenager with rich parents and a major malpractice suit to pressure hospitals to limit the hours of their interns and residents.

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In case you didn't notice: There is an Iraqi gov't counteroffensive against ISIL going on. StrategyPage reports.
President Obama is sending the Special forces types back in to repair the damage done when he removed them .

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the author of TeaAtTrianon has a podcast,..A lot of the stories most people "know" are propaganda that is related as history, but a good examination of the documents find another side of the story.

I remember when the book "Citizens" came out, and Americans were aghast to find out about the Vendee atrocities that had sort of been left out of the history books.

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Crab Nebula

Gizmodo has the story of the crab nebula, which was a star that went NOVA in 1054 AD and noticed by Chinese astronomers

At its center is a tiny, dense mass made up mostly of neutrons, rotating very rapidly and emitting regular pulses of radiation across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Pulsars like this one are what’s left behind when a star explodes. The material that doesn’t get ejected by the explosion collapses on itself. If there’s enough mass, the collapse forms a black hole, but smaller stars end up as pulsars.
At the center of the Crab Nebula, the Crab Pulsar is as massive as our Sun, but it’s only about 30 kilometers in diameter. It rotates about 30 times a second, and atronomers have used its pulses of radiation to study the Sun’s corona and the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, based on how radio and X-ray waves passed through or were blocked.

Howard Carter's paintings

Howard Carter was not a bored upper class toff who decided to loot pyramids: He was a kid whose father painted pictures of rich folks' pets and horses, and who learned to do the same.

Some of the rich folks where he worked had Egyptian souveniers, and he became interested, so when one group needed a person to copy the wall paintings inside tombs and couldn't afford a professional, they hired this lower class 17 year old instead.

The History blog has a nice summary of his work and career.

One example of his paintings:

an Oryx

tomb 3 of Khnumhotep III (or II acording to some authors) at Beni Hasan, temp. Amenemhet II to Sesostris II (Dyn. 12)

Once there, he learned a lot from other Egyptologists and started to do excavations.

He later branched into administration  as an inspector, got fired for telling off pushy tourists, and then sold paintings to stay alive. Later he went back to excavation and met Carnarvon, and the rest is history.

A painting of Hatsheptup's temple

Pride and Prejudice and....Mummies?

I was aware that Lord Carnarvon was the money behind Howard Carter's discovery of King Tut's tomb, (and that Downton Abbey was the home of the Carnarvons)

But what is their link to Jane Austen?

Jane Austen's world:

In Jane’s day, Lord Carnarvon was Henry, the 1st Earl. Jane wrote in a letter to Cassandra Austen, Saturday25 – Monday 27 th,  October 1800 :

“This morning we called at the Harwood’s & in their dining room found Heathcote & Chute for ever – Mrs Wm Heathcote & Mrs Chute – the first of whom took a long ride in to Lord Carnarvons Park and fainted away in the evening…”

go to the link for more photos of the Carnavons, Tut, and lithographs of how Downton Abbey (actual name: Highclere Castle) looked in Jane's day. More about Highclere Castle here.

so maybe instead of having a book called "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" they should have written "Pride and Prejudice and Mummies"...

News you can use

Canadian company gets a patent for a space elevator.

but no, not a real space elevator where you reach an oribiting space station... this one only reaches 12 miles up, but they could use it to launch rockets.

Of course, you would still have to use lots of money to lug the rockets up the elevator, but whatever

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related:
a sky ladder, by Cai Guo Qiang

LINK




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Starwars fashion and makeup?

Heh. Looks like the "future fashion" stuff we saw in films 50 years ago.

Why do they always think that women in the future will look like androids and not like Jane Austen? Or a geisha, or a Bollywood actress?

or even like Barbarella?

At least Princess Leia wore a modest tunic (or a copper bikini) and didn't look like a zombie.

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and from Freakonomics: The dangers of safety.

discussing foot ball and helmets design to prevent concussions.

think of your brain as a bowlful of jello.

CANTU: Well, the best analogy, or at least one that I think is useful, is to think of Jello in a bowl. And if you hit the bowl, very forcefully, you’ll see the Jello oscillate. If you put the Jello into a bowl that is elliptical in shape, not round, and hit it, because you’ll invariably hit off-center, you’ll see that the Jello moves forwards and backwards and it also spins around in the bowl. And those are the primary forces that are imparted to brain, the linear forces are those in one plane, front and back, or side to side, and the spinning forces are the rotational forces. And those combined forces cause shearing and straining of brain tissue. And that in turn leads to a metabolic cascade of dysfunction, that is what we refer to as a concussion.

This is not just a problem with football: IED's and landmines result in similar concussions in the military, who are busy investigating new designs to prevent injuries...

some of which look like the helmets in sci fi films.

so the NFL is talking with the military about new helmet designs.

Would this have saved lives?

As I noted in a previous post about the MtEverest disaster, lots of people half dead and confused to save those who were standed and freezing to death. (Is this the book being made into the up and coming movie?)

Well, maybe someone should build one of these

In the Article about 8 amazing isolated lodges/houses:

Image:Orien666

Solvay hut.

From Atlas Obscura:

Built in just five days by the Swiss Alpine Club, The Solvay Hut sits empty on the Matterhorn, simply waiting for climbers who have run into trouble.
A number of emergency huts have been placed along popular but treacherous mountain paths, many by the Swiss Alpine Club. Designed to provide a shelter for climbers in the case of storms, avalanches, or similar acts of God that might lead to an untimely death on a lonely peak. At an elevation above 13,000 feet the Solvay Hut is the Club's highest and most remote of these lifesaving structures. The hut is a simple affair, containing 10 beds and a telephone, but on the side of a mountain it could mean life or death.

and more here.

headsup TYWKIWDBI

Interesting folks are all over

Galla Placidia, Christian Roman Empress.
A new book on her life. WIKIPEDIA link

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Ex Astronaut Edgar Mitchell thinks the Aliens visited to view the Atomic bomb testing at White Sands and to keep us from blowing ourselves up. (Via Belmont Club)

Except, of course, Trinity site is northeast of White Sands, closer to the Apache reservation where I used to work than to White Sands... And Roswell? Well, where the "UFO" was found was actually north west of Roswell, over the mountain pass from Mescalero/Ruidoso, although it was closer by air to the Trinity site than to White Sands.

Apparantly they aliens had bad GPS systems and got lost.

The Apaches always saw UFO's but figured they were just experimental aircraft from Alamagordo (or maybe lost Wehrmacht pilots, who trained there).

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Speaking of Ruidoso, where Bill the Kid escaped from jail. One nun who saved the life of his buddy when the docs refused to treat him (and convinced Billy not to kill the docs) is being investigated for Sainthood. From NCR

After that incident, Sister Blandina and Billy the Kid became friends. She once visited him in jail, and he once called off a stage-coach robbery as soon as he realized she was one of the passengers.

When she wasn’t calling off outlaws, Sister Blandina was founding schools, building hospitals, teaching and caring for orphans and the poor and advocating for the rights of American Indians and other minorities. All in a day’s work.

She was born in Italy. More in Wikipedia.

so why was she wearing a bonnet and not a veil?

Because it wasn’t in our founding charism to wear habits. St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac, who began the Daughters of Charity back in the 1630s, told them that they were to dress like the ordinary peasant women of the day. St. Vincent wrote that the Daughters of Charity were to have “no cloister but a rented room; no veil but holy modesty.”
When St. Elizabeth Seton adapted St. Vincent’s Rule for the American Sisters of Charity in the early 1800s, she and her sisters wore the black dress and bonnet that widows wore in those days. (Mother Seton herself was a widow with 5 small children.)

something to remember when the traditionalists insist nuns should go back to their habits.

Headsup TeaAtTrianon.

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 Brian Sibley  reminisces about children's writer Tove Jansson, the inventer of the Moomins.

What captivated me about the chronicles of Moominland was the combination of fantastical storytelling with exquisite black-and-white illustrations that evoked feelings of warmth, happiness and security, shadowed by a hint of sadness, longing and regret, and tinged with a kind of yearning that is both nostalgic and elegiac.

In Moominvalley, everyone - however curious or odd – an invisible child or a cross-dressing Hemulen - was welcomed and accommodated somewhere in the tall, tower-like, Moomin House. It is tolerant world in which love is unconditionally guaranteed and where every individual is allowed - encouraged - to be themselves without criticism or censure; a world where home is the safe, centered heartbeat of life to which the inhabitants always return but from which they are also free to set off on adventurous quests in search of whatever might lie over this mountain or beyond that sea…

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Botanist hunts the rarest flower on earth, high in the Himalayas.

Titanic, 2015

headsup BelmontClub

family news

Internet outage on and off again, so it's easy to read but hard to post.

Big fight here on whether to keep the rice organic or not. I suggested a compromise, meaning one third will stay strictly organic, but the son in law wants to control everything.

Family News

Joy and Ruby are still in Manila.

I missed Emie's party for the Fiesta (San Lorenzo) because of a stomach flu, but am better now.

We are still waiting for the builders to finish Lolo's grave gazebo but the pipes holding up the roof were rusty and looked terrible, so I had our part time handyman Ferdie paint them white. He is now fixing the rotting ceiling in our kitchen and bathroom (where the roof leaked badly the ceiling had deteriorated). This should have been done last year, but he was working in Manila and I didn't have my pension or money for such things.

Our Lady of Sorrows and Nagasaki

Long essay at CWR

How do you respond to the enemy when your entire family is killed by a bomb?

a long book review on a physician who turned to prayer and acceptance, seeing the suffering as part of the larger picture.

Nagai also maintained that had taken place that August, as well as being so intensely personal, had a deeper significance for the whole of Japan. The horrors visited upon that land were linked to earlier actions and the spirit of militarism its leaders had fostered. This was not some sort of ‘curse’, however, but instead, viewed through the lens of eternity, became a mystical foreshadowing of the Apocalypse and, therefore, paradoxically, a preamble to the coming of the Lamb. Now Nagai understood events only in these mystical terms. Such sentiments were met with hostility, at least by many, for others thought they were to prove the beginning of a healing, both for themselves and their wounded nation.
Nagai's later years, those few granted him, were ones of witness, filled with prayer, contemplation and what care he could give his two children.

This physician was a non believer who became Christian, but the overtones of accepting suffering is also deeply Buddhist (in contrast to the "Jesus heals and makes us successful" Christianity of the west).

So why chose to be a Christian?

Guess I'll have to read the book.

However, I am reminded of Endo's The Samurai, who accepts Christ, not as the triumphant King of the Spanish priests, but because He is always there as a loving presence, caring for those who are the suffering. More from Endo HERE.

The religious mentality of the Japanese is --just as it was at the time when the people accepted Buddhism--responsive to one who "suffers with us" and who "allows for our weakness," but their mentality has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them.  In brief, the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father.  With this fact always in mind I tried not so much to depict God in the father-image that tends to characterize Christianity, but rather to depict the kind-hearted maternal aspect of God revealed to us in the personality of Jesus. (1)

Remembering the war in the Pacific

CSPAN (streaming video) has a lecture by Richard B Frank on the Pacific war...

and notes that American students are clueless to the huge number of Chinese and other civilians killed in that war.

via SenseOfEventsBlog

a lecture on the Chinese part of the war 


and an extract of his book at the NYTimes, discussing the firebombing of Tokyo.


and no, I haven't listened to the whole thing, since the internet is going on and off and I can't download it.

Cat photo of the day

just for nice

It's on Anne Althouse' blog, used to illustrate an article on fluffy cute language that just might be hiding a less nice reality.

sort of like the fluffy language about that African lion, which made him seem like a cute kitty, not a potential killer of locals when he wandered off the reserve.

Yes, it's the latest fashion. Do you like it?

Indonesian SeaSlug Picture: Lynn Wu / Media Drum World

one of UKTelegraph's pictures of the day.

Bad Boys rule (or maybe not)

via Medievalists.net:

an essay on why modern kids love the Vikings, and why their view of the Vikings is not based on reality, but mythology.

By the end of the class, my students acknowledged having begun the term with one conception of the Vikings and ending it with another, more educated view. And yet they also were confident that their new knowledge was largely not going to hamper how they viewed Vikings and what they wanted them to be. Why such dogged determination to have the history we want, rather than what actually was? Part of the answer perhaps lies in the fact that what we want is not history at all, but rather something more akin to heritage – that “fuzzy around the edges nostalgic past” to which we have emotional ties.27 With heritage, the past becomes what we need it to be for lots of reasons. The post-modern, global world has created an ill-defined, disjointed present that proceeds and changes at the most rapid pace ever experienced in human history. It is comforting to feel we know for sure where we came from, even if it is a past we knowingly, at least partially, fabricate because that informs not only who we are but where we are headed. And that certainty is reassuring.

But a similar fantasy might be behind the glamour of ISIS, who kill the innocent but hey, they are pushing the caliphate.

So is Obama's backing of Iran a way to fight them by replacing one medieval theocratic vision with a more benign alternative?

As for the glamour of the bad boys: StrategyPage notes that the Taliban in Afghanistan is actually getting unpopular because they kill civilians, and the locals are mad. And mad people pick up their cellphones and report them.

and despite the astroturf "Black lives matter" demonstrations, the real story is that the gang culture is behind a lot of murders.... yet for youths with missing fathers, gangs similarly give violent young men companionship, meaning, and a feeling of power...


But here too, the real tragedy is that they kill the innocent...

To the gang members, James was “collateral damage,” Nistorescu said.
“It just goes to show that there’s just no limit to the violence,” Nistorescu said. “There’s no understanding that anything is sacred.”

And the Vikings? Well, actually they settled down and became Christians... although some note that some because Normans who remained just as bad, so eventually the Pope sent them on the crusades to get rid of them. But that is another story.

Lessons from the past

British History Podcast is excellent, and is now posting episodes on ancient Wales.

Today's episode has this medical related item: why did the plagues tend to hit the Celtic British including Wales instead of the Anglo Saxons? He posits it might be immunity from living on the continent, as opposed to isolation in the Welsh valleys...

It was too late for Justinians' plague, but of course, in the milder areas the plague could have persisted in pockets and broken out again. Or maybe it is because they continued to trade with the Mediterranean areas so disease was introduced from there.

UnivPennMuseum has a lecture of archeology that points out that pottery suggests Mediterranean trade continued into Wales and Cornwall for years after the Anglo Saxon invasion,  despite the idea that Britain remained isolated...but I could be off on the dates, since this episode is about 685 and the UP lecture is about 560...so I'll have to check if trade continued for another century.

Check the maps: Cornwall's tin was known to ancient Greece, and the south coast trade links to Spain and the Mediterranean in contrast to the Anglo Saxon's links to nearby France.

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hotair links to a WAPO article telling us that the scientific data on breakfast recommendations are based on....nothing. No hard data. Or data contaminated by other factors...

So what else is new

I dropped out of a "nurses diet" study, which still publishes data. I realized that most of what I writing down was made up because I simply was too busy to remember everything I ate... so how many population surveys are based on made up input, or the input from self selected obsessive compulsive types?

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Spengler's article on modern education's agnosia of the past. They not only don't know, but they don't know that they don't know.

My daughter had attended a seminar on Mozart’s opera, and we had discussed Tirso’s theological joke beforehand. She called me crestfallen afterwards: most of the students wanted to know why Don Giovanni’s behavior was a problem in the first place. Wasn’t it a lifestyle choice?

we see a similar agnosia in bioethics...

Multiculturalism was supposed to add to the database, but what actually happened was that the database was replaced with intellectual fads.

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I should note that I am slowly working through a book about epidemics in the Philippines in the 19th century....made worse by the independence uprisings. Uh, maybe made worse because they didn't have decent water or sewage? I mean, our town still has open air ditches for sewers...

Factoid of the day: Sea Silk

From TYWIKIWDBI:

Sea silk is an extremely fine, rare, and valuable fabric that is made from the long silky filaments or byssus secreted by a gland in the foot of [bivalve molluscs]... The cloth produced from these filaments can be woven even finer than silk, and is extremely light and warm; however, it attracts clothes moths, the larvae of which will eat it. It was said that a pair of women's gloves made from the fabric could fit into half a walnut shell.

More HERE 

and HERE.



and video HERE.

Is it Salma or is it Friedrich?

From EdDriscoll at Instapundit: Someone tweeted a quote from Friedrich Hayek, but put Salma's photo on it.

Guess the tweeter (and many commenters) weren't aware that a buxom actress is not the same person as the dour economist.


for the clueless, a professor lists their characteristics and how they differ from each other.

and for those who hate reading economics textbooks:

The Road To Serfdom Comic book

Ancient Hittite Ruins

the story of history/archeology is usually about digging up ruins and then marveling over these cities or tombs.

LINK 

LINK2

Yet to get a different story, you need to read stuff like SALT, the history of that needed item, or what I am reading (slowly since it has a lot of new information for me) : Elixir, by Brian Fagan, about irrigation systems that kept the world alive.

So, I wondered, how did the Hittites keep a huge empire alive in a dry land where there is no water?

uh, dams? 

he dam was ordered by Hittite King Tudhaliya IV in the name of goddess Hepat, according to ancient Hittite tablets, he said. “After a drought Anatolia suffered in 1200 B.C., Tudhaliya IV imported wheat from Egypt so that his subjects would not suffer a famine. Following this, the king ordered numerous dams to be built in central Anatolia, in 1240 B.C. All but one of them became dysfunctional over time. The one in Alacahöyük has survived because the water source is located inside the dam's reservoir,” he explained.
Çınaroğlu said the construction technique used in building the dam was similar to those of today but that the stone blocks forming the dam were joined with clay instead of cement.
The Hittites used the dam to provide both irrigation and tap water, said Çınaroğlu, adding: “In ancient times, tap water from this dam was collected in a separate pool, and after filtering, the water was carried to the city center two kilometers away. Canals built based on the water's flow astonished us.”

more HERE PDF 

The important Stories below the headlines

Fracking, by keeping the price of oil down, essentially is econnomic warfare against Iran...

the bad news is that it is also hurting the economies of a lot of Middle Eastern lands and those in North Africa which rely on oil income to run the economy.

From StrategyPage.

In addition to the Islamic terrorist threat the government also has to contend with the economic damage done by the low oil price. ... The oil rich Arab Gulf states (particularly Saudi Arabia) are responsible for this and are keeping the oil price low to weaken Iran, which is waging a campaign to take control of Arab oil in the Gulf. The Arab oil states point out that even without the Iran threat the new American fracking technology will also keep the oil price low. The Arabs had hoped the oil price campaign against Iran against Iran would also destroy the American fracking firms but that has not worked out as the American companies have adapted. It seems that Iran has adapted as well. Meanwhile Algeria and other smaller oil exporting nations have to adapt as best they can.

====================

Eclampsia is a major cause of maternal mortality. Women swell up with edema, develop proteinuria and high blood pressure, and can convulse and even die. It is most common in teenagers, malnourished women, older pregnant women, and with twin pregnancies.

Now the UKMAIL has an article saying that the anti cholesterol medicine Prevastatin could stop the syndrome.

Research by Prof Ahmed suggested that pre-eclampsia was the result of an imbalance between proteins which make blood vessels and those that block them.,,..ne of the actions of statins, in addition to their cholesterol-lowering effects, is that they can prevent the growth of new blood vessels....Women who have had pre-eclampsia are twice as likely to develop other cardiovascular diseases later in life, and babies are at increased risk of heart disease. It is thought to be caused by the placenta not developing properly due to a problem with the blood vessels that supply it.

Why prevastatin? It doesn't cross the placental barrier...

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World population will climb to 11 billion by 2100, fueled by the high brith rate in Africa.
No wonder they are pushing birth control there.
However, the real way to lower birth rates is making families richer and educating women, which is why Asia and Europe will depopulate and have too many old people to keep alive on pensions.

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So is Africa doomed to overpopulation and hunger?
Europe and benevolent NGO's kept Africa "traditional", and since economic development had stalled due to corruption and the educational emphasis on academics instead of practical work, it may be China and big business that teaches them how to grow enough food, using chemicals and GM crops.

Humanitarian groups that deal with global hunger and peasants’ rights call corporate land deals neocolonialism and agri-imperialism. Yet veterans of agricultural development say the massive infusion of private cash, infrastructure, and technology that such deals may bring to poor rural areas could be a catalyst for desperately needed development—if big projects and small farmers can work together. The key, says USAID’s Gregory Myers, is protecting the land rights of the people. “This could significantly reduce global poverty, and that could be the story of the century

from an old NatGeo story, who of course points out "big corporations" but the story starts with a Chinese investment firm establishing a super farm..

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Greece defaulted, but it was the German government that benfitted from the problem. From the BBC

The Greek debt crisis has saved the German government some €100bn (£70bn; $109bn) in lower borrowing costs because investors have sought safety in German bonds, a study has found.Even if Greece defaults on all its debt, Germany would still benefit, says the German IWH institute.

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The war against the Kurds: President Obama okayed Turkey bombing the Kurds, the last pro American group in the Middle East that he hasn't yet betrayed.

  BBC LINK

"The Turkish claim they are fighting Islamic State… but in fact they are fighting the PKK," Cemil Bayik told BBC's Jiyar Gol. "They are doing it to limit the PKK's fight against IS. Turkey is protecting IS. "[President] Erdogan is behind IS massacres. His aim is to stop the Kurdish advance against them, thus advancing his aim of Turkishness in Turkey."

 Heck of a job, Barry.
============

Stories below the fold

China holding war games with over 100 ships in the west Philippine sea...and notes that their "coast guard" steals stuff.

Yup. Chinese pirates redux.

a complicated analysis of their economic news.

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EdDriscoll at Instapundit links to Mark Steyn on how liberal policies have revived the crime of NYC in the 1970s that was memorialized in the Death Wish film, where a vigilante took down a thug.

I wouldn't know, since I spent most of the 1970s in Africa, but it does mention Charles Bronson:

Would the film have been as effective with someone else as Kersey? Burt Reynolds? Ryan O’Neal? No. That’s where Bronson’s leathery weathered visage and those squinting eyes came into their own. You didn’t need to know the specifics – World War Two tailgunner, one of 15 kids of a Lithuanian coal-miner. You could see it in the crevices and grooves: Bronson was one of the last movie stars to project a sense of experience beyond cinema. Who does so now? Pretty boys like Tom Cruise? 

Bronson's family still lived in PA near our (coal) town...He wasn't close to a lot of his siblings, but when he visited, locals tried to let him in privacy, and the locals liked him.

Small related story: I once was on an inter city bus in rural Colombia, where a Bronson movie was played for the passengers.

Even 30 years ago American culture was everywhere...

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why some animals have different shaped pupils (the black part of the eye).

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Fake survey alert: so 88 percent of adults said they texted sex messages?

Uh, I doubt 88 percent of adults text. And sure enough: It was NOT a random sample so was worthless (GIGO bias)

 Stasko and Geller enlisted 870 heterosexual adults to answer an online survey about sexting. The participants ranged in age between 18 and 82, with an average age of 35. The survey takers were recruited through the Internet site Amazon Mechanical Turk, and whites and women were overrepresented compared with the U.S. population as a whole.

So why does the LATimes bother to post an article about a very biased sample as if it were a valid scientific survey?

To try to insist this is normal behavior?

Or because someone there wants is both good and normal behavior for teens, so change the law.

The dirty little secret is that although low level sexting is common in older teens (mainly viewing naked ladies or with their regular girlfriends),  the practice in very young teenagers (average age 12 years) makes them more likely to be seduced by predators, be willing to have sex with a stranger.  Why do I say "predators"?

One good way to seduce a teen is to tell him/her that "everyone is doing it" and ridicule them for saying no...
such bullying works to introduce kids to take drugs, and works on the immature to have sex.

Which is why Pediatricians are urged to educate their patients that this is not true, and will put them in danger of STD's or worse.

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Ottoman history podcast about Islamic hospitals in the middle ages.

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from the BBC: The Stillwell road, 70 years later.

he "24 Zig" road in Qinglong, Guizhou Province, South-West China

1945 film here

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wonderful Dog photos.by Harry Page at the UKTelegraph.

Family news

Internet off and on all weekend.

Chano busy at a birthday party in Manila on Sunday, and then helped to take down and bring the tradefair exhibit back home.

Joy and Ruby and I went to Luz for Sunday lunch to get out of the house.

I got my passport in the mail. Joy is going to Manila today to get the visa restamped in the new passport and check if the papers are finished for me to get the survivor part of Lolo's small veterans' pension. I don't get his Pennsylvania state pension since he wasn't married when he stopped that job so didn't have a wife clause in it, for me or for his first wife.

His first wife is ailing, and has to use CPAP for sleep apnea. So I guess she won't be moving in with her son here. Alas, she refuses to leave her house, where she is a hoarder with 30 years of junk. Her daughter and grandsons keep an eye on her, but they are 100 miles away so can't visit daily.

The newest kitten is trying to eat: If they live long enough to eat solid food, they usually live, until they get older and explore and get killed by the dogs.

Me? I am depressed as usual. No decent tv shows, so I listened to audiobooks on my tablet. Lots of them on Librivox, and a lot of newer ones probably illegally posted on youtube... they get removed quickly so you have to check frequently.


Someone downloaded the book about the Himalaya disaster on Youtube, but they seem to have the chapters mixed up.

Anyway, it is a depressing book. The best survivor story? When they had to triage on who to move down to camp, two dying unconscious people were left behind because they just couldn't take everyone. Then one of them, a Texas doc, woke up and walked into camp. Guess they didn't know about Texans. Discussion on how and why from a medical standpoint here.


The most depressing part? No, not the misjudgements or that people just were to exhausted to help, but some Asians who saw the problem and instead of helping those injured and could have been saved just continued to climb to reach the peak. Their explanation? Well, we didn't know them.

that is one problem with Asia, and is implied in religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, even after those beliefs are watered down by modernism. The idea that one has a karma, and deserves what happens to  you is one subtext of reincarnation that is rarely acknowledged by western religious dabblers...(and is alas a subtext of Oprah and other new agers who insist if you think right you can be healthy wealthy and wise...the implication that it is your own fault if you are sick or poor).

True, the saints of these religions do help, and good people are good people all over the world, but Buddha, seeing a poor man die, went up the mountain to find enlightenment: he didn't start a hospital.

Christianity, however, and it's sister religions Judaism and Islam, have the idea to help your neighbor as part of it's essence of serving the deity, so even post-Christians in the west insist on being nice and helping strangers as the essence of ethics.

What is that thingie on the street lamp?

Photo credit: Craig M. Story, via Slate.

It's a Stockbridge Damper...from Wikipedia:

A Stockbridge damper is a tuned mass damper used to suppress wind-induced vibrations on slender structures such as overhead power lines^[1] and long cantilevered signs.^[2] The dumbbell-shaped device consists of two masses at the ends of a short length of cable or flexible rod, which is clamped at its middle to the main cable. The damper is designed to dissipate the energy of oscillations in the main cable to an acceptable level.^[3] Its distinctive shape gives it the nickname "dog-bone damper".^[2]

named for Doctor Stockbridge, a California engineer...


headsup from TYWKIWDBI

Remembering my cousin's broken leg

In World War II, my ditzy cousin was a sailor, and his ship had been damaged by a kamikazi. While being repaired, he and the other sailors knew they were scheduled to return to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan, where casualty estimates were huge.

So he went out, got drunk and passed out in a friend's apartment...waking up, he couldn't find the door so jumped out the window and broke his leg.

As a result, he was home on crutches, visiting my mom, when VJ day was declared. She said the town erupted into quite a party in celebration. And the Bomb? Well, they saw the bomb that stopped the war as a blessing, because it meant that he would not be killed in the war.

A lot of people correctly lamenting the H-Bombing of Japan forget the alternative: that the estimates of such an invasion were huge.

From the Diplomad2.0

As the American invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa showed, the Japanese were brave, tough, skillful, and determined defenders of their home islands. American military planners looked at the casualties from those two campaigns and extrapolated to what it would cost to invade Japan proper. The US military estimated that there would be at least one million American casualties, plus hundreds of thousands of other allied dead and wounded, and perhaps twenty to thirty times that many Japanese casualties in the case of an invasion.

the Japanese civilians would have resisted, using primitive weapons, true, but they would have been the casualties. The mass suicides of civilians in  Saipan show that some civilians would have killed themselves instead of surrendering.

If the Nazis invaded England, a similar fight would have occurred. Even Mrs Miniver had a gun for protection. And here in the Philippines, Americans forget that most of those dying in the Bataan death march were Filipinos...and that the locals resisted as best they could (since schools had to toe that Japanese line, most schools shut down rather than cooperate)...and many younger folks resisted...my husband's older brother and cousin fled to the hills to fight the Japanese in 1941 (my teenaged husband joined only at the end of the war, partly because of MacArthur's plea, and partly to defend the locals from the terrible atrocities by angry retreating Japanese soldiers against civilians.)

Door to door fighting is one of the worst scenerios for any war, and when civilians resist it is worse.

And then there is this link (via Instapundit).

A RIFLE BEHIND EVERY BLADE OF GRASS: Slate: What Would Have Happened if Germany Had Invaded the U.S. During World War II? “In addition, everybody had guns. One commonality among the nations conquered by Germany is that private firearms ownership was heavily restricted or simply banned. With no such restrictions here and given the fact that modern combined arms tactics were still in their infancy, it’s difficult to see how the Germans would have avoided taking heavy casualties.

Yeah. A similar argument was made to my National Guard unit, during the cold war, telling us the Russians would never invade us because they would be resisted.

Ah but revisionist history in the leftist universities have a meme, which is anti American, so let's ignore the context of the use of the bomb, which was viewed by Harry Truman as just a bigger simpler version of the fire bombing which already had decimated Tokyo.

The third alternative, an agreed surrender without an invasion, was not a realistic alternative, alas, despite the revisionist leftist histories that insist that Japan would have meekly surrendered.

such a surrender would have been viewed by the hardline war party as treason, similar to the the surrender of an un-invaded Germany after WWI. That may have allowed the resurrection of a dangerous Japan 30 years later, rather than the present pacifist country that now exists.

Second verse, same as the first

I just scooted around the headlines and blogstuff, and it is all the same stuff rehashed over and over again.


And that brought to mind this phrase: Second verse same as the first.

stories behind the headlines

Father Z and the Catholic blogs see a conspiracy of German money behind the "shadow synod" who tried unsuccessfully to hijack the previous synod on marriage and the family and are regrouping for another takeover try.

so is the Pope going to be a patsy for the culture wars? and if so, which side?

theAnchoress even had to remind someone on a diocesan (!) tv show that the Pope was not an American politician.



but a lot of what the Pope talks about is about third world problems, not the ideology of the west.  And as a Jesuit, he will take the good from both sides and try to prune away the bad parts...

Ethical capitalism has made the world rich, but when it morphs into encouraging rich people to buy too much stuff while destroying the environment and underpaying factory workers, or allowing crony capitalism/corruption (president Godlman sachs?), it is a moral issue. Even JPII noted this as a problem.

Of course, the Pope doesn't push socialism per se, since socialism is also prone to a greedy elite manipulating the poor and destroying the environment in order to stay in power. (as what is going on in China).

why should you, as a secular, care about what the Pope says about such problems? Well, the church is a major player in the power plays of the world, for better or for worse, so knowing what is going on is important for understanding.

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related item:


what is the Christian right doing nowadays? Focus on the Family's Truth project training now available for download.




so why do some thoughtful people call the series "indoctrination"? Because it is teaching only one side of an argument.

Fair enough... but remember ordinary folks have a life and the background noise in the media presents only the other side of the argument 24/7...

and no, as a Catholic, I don't agree with their philosophical worldview (we Catholics usually cite natural law rather than Biblical quotes to support our arguments about social problems) but if you work with Evangelicals, you need to know how they view the world and today's problems.

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Move over, Luke Skywalker: it's not exactly a lightsaber, but for $1000 you too can buy a laser cutter reports StrategyPage.

 In 2013 a company (supported by U.S. Air Force research funds) came up with a workable solution. It was the very portable TEC (Thermal Erosive Cutting) Torch. Basically it’s a handheld cutting torch using expendable cartridges that used a mixture of thermite and other chemicals to burn through most anything. 

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TeaAtTrianon links to an article on Katherine Howard. 
Henry VIII's number four wife.

Although she is traditionally portrayed as a flightly bimbo who deserved to die for cheating on Henry VIII, her actual actions portray a woman who risked his anger by helping others, including being nice to his third ex-wife Anne of Cleves, and to poor elderly Margaret Pole, who she sent warm clothing in prison. And like Anne of  Bolyne, her crime was that she might have been too powerful to those trying to manipulate Henry's policies.

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why the kerfuffle about a dead elderly lion? Maybe it's because no one wants to notice a couple of million dead Africans. Well, why notice: They aren't exporting terror, and if China takes over all their mineral wealth, well, who cares?

StrategyPage report on the latest developments in Central Africa and also the tribal civil war in South Sudan, backstory is who gets the oil money, and not mentioned: it is partly a religious war proxy from Sudan.

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So who bombed the churches in Las Crucas

LINK

and why one Baptist and one Catholic church?

Mexican drug gangs have killed several priests there, so they are probably the main suspect.


headsup via GetReligion.

Tolkien essays

two essays on the characters and how their choices can mirror our choices

ONE

TWO


internet going on and off today, so light blogging.

Be Afraid, be very afraid

Pinker insists we discard ethics to get cures for rich first world people. After all, what could go wrong?

A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as “dignity,” “sacredness,” or “social justice.”

Then he uses the strawman argument: some treatment like vaccines, blood transfusions and anesthesia were considered immoral. Yes, but only by splinter groups, like George Bernard Shaw and his friends, who opposed both vivisection and vaccines, or Jehovah witnesses who oppose blood transfusions.

True, Catholics opposed IVF, because it separates baby making from love making, and makes babies a commodity (rich couples paying poor women in India as incubators) (and of course, just ignore the hundred thousand frozen babies in the freezer ethical dilemma).

So why did he publish this article now? Maybe the Youtube video of babies being cut up need to be dismissed as necessary and good.

ironically, in today's world you can always find an ethicist to okay your actions, so bioethics is not what is standing in the way.

Blame it on Hollywood: only they dare to write about an agenda that is lurking deep in the bioethics literature but rarely discussed in the MSM.

 Nor should it thwart research that has likely benefits now or in the near future by sowing panic about speculative harms in the distant future. These include perverse analogies with nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like “Brave New World’’ and “Gattaca,’’ and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs.

True.

but if you want to see how money manages to run around the paper thin ethical barriers, just come here.

Who needs warehouses of zombies when you can just give a thousand dollars to a poor Indian or Filipino for his kidneys? Or get it from a Chinese political prisoner scheduled for execution. Need to see if your vaccines or antibiotics work? Just go overseas (or use American Indians to see if Hep A vaccine works or if treating strep stops kidney damage).(for those of you who insist poor people benefit from the money when they grow babies or donate organs, the answer is: no they end up with poor health, and the middle man gets most of the profit.)

as for Nazi atrocities: killing and dismembering babies old enough to live outside the womb does resemble them. And in the wings: Using the brain damaged who are not brain dead but only handicapped, for experimentation and organ donation that will kill them.

article headsup from Arts and Letters daily

hackers needed

Anonymous has mainly hacked western government's secrets, but maybe they need to hack a few more secrets to find what is hidden in plain sight.

It was Russian hackers who exposed the fakeness before the climate conference in Copenhagen,but there is another one coming up and one wonders if the fake information will be implemented in treaties.

Congressional vetoes won't stop Obama in this. Like in immigration, he will just implement "regulations" that do the same thing.

the Russians have hacked the Saudis and guess what? They are sponsoring terrorism via their charities. StrategyPage link

so now what we need is Russian or anarchist hackers to find out what will be mandated in the so called "Iran agreement". Belmont club has more.

 The true facts are hidden or selectively emphasized in order to shape a narrative. One of the many examples is the Iran nuclear deal.  Before you declare yourself for or against it, ask  yourself: what does the public know about it?  That question turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer.
The Wall Street Journal notes that much of what the deal is about is hidden in Closed Covenants.  ”The Obama Administration insists there’s nothing secret about the Iran nuclear deal, even as it claims not to have read two crucial side deals Tehran has struck with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Confidential agreements, but no secrets” is the way top U.S. negotiator Wendy Sherman describes the deals, which are thought to concern the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programs.”

Belmont club also brings out how a partisan judge has stopped the baby body parts videos.  Well, why not? And since affluent white women only have late term abortions when the baby is disabled (e.g. Down's syndrome) and less valuable for parts, I suspect that most of these babies come from minority women...who might be upset that their babies are used for profit.

Again, hackers are needed to hack the videos and put the on Youtube/thepiratebay. And hackers are needed to check if minority women are being pressured into late term abortion so they can make a profit.

a third item in Belmont Club's article is an email from an affluent NGO that already astroturfed local groups asked Hillary to help push abortion on Kenya.

So we didn't need hackers for that email.

But will anonymous hack emails that link "marriage reform" or "maternal child health" (read abortion/population control) with the willingness of the US to defend us against China?

Has a gay ambassador been sent to Viet Nam as a clue that America the wimp has other priorities than defending the sea lanes and oil in the West Philippine seas?

Yet few here expect the US to defend us against Chinese aggression, so Japan and Australia are stepping in to help.

The "gay ambassador" to VietNam story from Drudge brings up a coterie there.

Uh, Gresham's law? one wonders if all these "inclusive" policies are destroying the US military? And discouraging people of faith from working at the State Department (something that bodes ill for understanding the religious impulses that are important in foreign cultures).

Ah, but don't worry,
Distraction alert!

we are now being told the dead lion's brother is protecting his cubs... hello: it doesn't work that way...real story is probably that the dead lion's brother took over his pride and kicked him out, which is why he wandered off the reserve to find food.

and who released that story to begin with? a western funded NGO of course. Locals don't care. As even TIME magazine noted: Locals eat the animals, and poach to make money to support their families.  Allowing hunting is a good alternative for locals to make money and discourage poachers.

So who decided to push it as a narrative? The editors of the MSM, (who also chose to ignore the abover stories) and the SJW who run the two minute hate fest on Twitter/facebook.

Look! a dead Lion!

Family news

Big row with my stepson about money.

He wants to sell the apartment in Manila that Lolo bequeathed to his granddaughter for when she goes to college (and for me to use until I die). We rent it out for income right now.

It is a power play.

Insomnia download of the week

link

Dragonriders of Pern.



this is book one but it looks like others of the series are available too.

Solar panels and butterflies

Cabbage White butterfly Photo: Alamy

UKTelegraph story about how the cabbage white butterfly help scientist figure how to position solar panels.

A team of experts from the University of Exeter have shown that mimicking the v-shaped posture adopted by Cabbage Whites to heat up their flight muscles before take-off, can raise the amount of solar power by nearly 50 per cent.
The secret appears to be the angle that the butterflies hold their wings, approximately 17 degrees from horizontal. It could even improve the effectiveness of sunbathing.

simple solar panels are cheap: We used them to heat our daytime water in our hospital in Africa 40 years ago. And many Okies had them on their roofs, and the poor would put black barrels inside their solar porches (porches that were enclosed but had large windows and screens, often on the south side of the house) that got hot in the day and helped keep that part of the house warm at night.

But electricity spouting panels are too expensive for poor countries. and they require the use of rare earth metals, of which China has a monopoly, and often are toxic, and spread pollution that harm locals where they are mined, used in manufacturing, or where they are thrown away.

one underreported story in the west is the anti pollution riots in China. On the other hand, would they prefer to be poor, with periodic famines?

The answer is neither. You can find ways to dispose of these toxins. But that takes money, which is lacking in poorer countries (and/or stolen by corrupt officials, but that is another story).

Mad Dads one, drones zero

Don't use a drone to spy on sunbathing daughters, at least in Kentucky. Those guys don't like peeping Toms:

VanMeter has a 16-year-old daughter who lays out at their pool. She says a drone hovering with a camera is creepy and weird. “I just think you should have privacy in your own backyard,” she said. Merideth agrees and said he had to go see for himself. “Well, I came out and it was down by the neighbor’s house, about 10 feet off the ground, looking under their canopy that they’ve got under their back yard,” Merideth said. “I went and got my shotgun and I said, ‘I’m not going to do anything unless it’s directly over my property.’” That moment soon arrived, he said. “Within a minute or so, here it came,” he said. “It was hovering over top of my property, and I shot it out of the sky.”

yes he was arrested, but I doubt he'll be convicted if any parents are on the  jury

via theotherMcCain

Meteorites in your gutter

I had read how the Vatican Astronomer went with an expedition to Antarctica to find meterites, and  how folks in the New Mexican deserts find them.

But can you actually find them in your area?

David Reneke's space blog explains how to find them.

the clue: They are iron.

Rain allows them to be rinsed from the roof of a house and concentrated wherever the gutters empty.  No or little rain means less gutter deposits.   So, how do we begin collecting these cool nuggets of science fact?  Grab a Ziploc bag, a small magnet, a spoon or small spade, and a wide-eyed little boy or girl.  Prepare to discover something just as cool as a good sci-fi flick.
To begin, go outside and find the spillway of one of your house gutters.  There is normally a patch of dirt and somewhat rocky-looking debris.  Scoop a small sample of this into the Ziploc bag with the spoon.  Take the sample to the deck or inside the house; just be certain you have a good work area to begin your exploration of the sample.  Dump the sample onto a paper plate or paper towel.  If the sample is wet, allow it to dry for a few minutes.  Once dry, take the magnet and pass it over the sample.  Be careful to avoid touching the sample directly.
What you are looking for are small rock-like particles which will begin to “leap” onto the magnet.  These little rocks are made up of mostly iron, an element not normally found on top of the soil.  It is, however, a primary ingredient in most micrometeorites.  Congratulations!  You have now discovered your own little samples of out-of-this-world rocks. 

Chicken post of the day

So who brought the chickens? ViaNatGeo

DNA showed that the chicken bones in South America dated before the Spanish arrived.

and then there is the question of how the Polynesians got sweet potatoes.

TechTimes article about these migrations



The real question is how the DNA of Australian aborigenes got into the DNA of South American Indians.

via Archeoblog

it's not reality it's a painting

MatteShot Blog has a series of posts on the art of matte painting: used for backgrounds in many movies, but rarely noticed by those watching.