Stories behind the headlines

Ottoman history podcast discusses a new book on African slavery in the Ottoman Empire... and how their descendants still are there today.

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An article on Cahokia.

Yes, those mass graves of human offerings are there, but so are the rich guys.

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When fracking lowers the cost of oil, recycling plastic isn't cost effective.

However, the problem here is that plastic bags are thrown away and clog up the sewer system. Some places are banning plastic bags, since the alternative it to train people to stop littering.

Well, at least our ex mayor did put trash bins on the streets. It didn't help much, since the cats and dogs dig in at night and scatter the trash all over the place. But covering the drainage ditches might help too..

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Three cheers for E Coli... which could be transformed to make cheap biofuel.

well, why not? It already makes your Insulin

• 1978 Genentech produces biosynthetic 'human' insulin in Escherichia coli bacteria using recombinant DNA techniques, licenses to Eli Lilly
• 1981 Novo Nordisk chemically and enzymatically converts porcine to 'human' insulin
• 1982 Genentech synthetic 'human' insulin (above) approved
• 1983 Eli Lilly and Company produces biosynthetic 'human' insulin with recombinant DNA technology, Humulin

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Uh OH: What is that purple blog?




of course, I'm old enough to remember when the blog ate....Downingtown PA (?!) and Steve McQueen saved the world when he noticed it didn't like getting cold....

Dave requests an Air Force heavy-lift cargo aircraft to transport the Blob to the Arctic, where it is parachuted to the ice. Dave says that while the Blob is not dead, at least it has been stopped. To this, Steve Andrews replies with the last line in the film, "Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold."

uh oh: Glabal warming....


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Sigh. Pedophilia in a private school. Who wudda thot?

Ah but this one is in China. and the netizens are shocked: not because a teacher sexually abused his students but that he sexually abused boys.

But then, I'm old enough to remember when male teachers who had female students as their girlfriends was considered cute...

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quick: Before the copyright cops find it's there:

lecture sereies of the day: history of Italy in the Middle ages.



and wait til you come to the one discussing the Sack of Rome, where the protestant mercenries of CharlesV could teach a thing or two to ISIS.

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another nil finding causes questions of latest science theory: Scientists at Antarctic Observatory can't find steril nutrinos.

This is science at it's best.... my feud is with all those who claim they know the answer to everything.

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Medievalnet discusses medieval zombies. link2

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There are some low profile stories about the possibility of stealing elections in this year's contentious US Presidential race.

Al J. has an article on the problem.
the left sees gerrymandering and voting registration laws as making it harder for the poor to vote. (true)
The right sees gerrymandering and not allowing verification of who actually is eligible as a problem (true).

But the ig worry is that someone will hack the voting machines. and the BernieBoys suspect Hillary rigged the machines against their guy, so it's not just the Trumpettes who are worried about this.

And the solution? Paper ballots.

of course, "stuffing the ballot box" is an old fashioned way to steal an election too.... which is why the Philippines recently changed to electronic voting, figuring it will take a few years for the crooked politicians to figure out how to hack the machines.

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The mystery of the green diving pool...

and Cupping hits the Olympics.

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The Piltdown hoax

 Instapundit links to an article that claims that Charles Dawson was the guy behind the fake hominoid find the Piltdown man.

Piltdown Man, if it weren’t a hoax, would indeed have been a big find. Dawson knew, as De Groote and colleagues note, that “the British scientific community was anticipating in a missing link between apes and humans: a large brain, an ape-like face and jaws, and heavily fossilized materials that indicated great antiquity.” Dawson quite simply gave scientists the evidence that they wanted.

honesty in science is a big thing, but scientists are alas human too.

But the fraud has a religious aspect too: NO, not evolution (catholics have posited evolution as the way God created things was an acceptable theory of how things came to be goes back to St Augustine, albeit the "blind" version of Darwin is not accepted). The religious link is that one of those involved in the find went on to preach a new religion of man evolving to a higher power that has infiltrated some in Catholicism.  More at my bitch blog about this.

But anyway, one of the lesser known facts is that guess who was part of that discovery? Yes, our friend Pierre, beloved of new age nuns and heretics. from Wikipedia:

 In June 1912 he formed part of the original digging team, with Arthur Smith Woodward andCharles Dawson at the Piltdown site, after the discovery of the first fragments of the (fraudulent) "Piltdown Man", with some even suggesting he participated in the hoax.^[1][2] 

he later went on to help with other digs, including that of the Peking man, a fossil that has also disappeard, albeit unlike Piltdown man, is consistent with other finds of homo erectus.

The Penn Museum has a good lecture on the hoax:



my comment is that Christians are never really surprised when great leaders fall from pride, and that wolves in sheep's clothing fake religion to get rich and powerful, but science and the new atheists tend to overlook the sins of their own.

Which is why they point out the 30 years war and ignore the genocides of Mao and Stalin in the name of scientific Marxism

The Kalavala

Librivox has an audiobook for the Kalavala.

Text here.

one of the inspirations for Tolkien, especially the book Children of Hurin, which I would advise you not to read if you are depressed.

Kenda interview

LINK



Homicide hunter season six is starting in the USA, but locally we are still on season 3.

Uh OH: Project Sauron

Uh OH:

Cyberwar in progress, and the Kaspersky lab has named them Sauron.

I am no expert, but they describe a sophisticated program that selects who to hack, and is suspected of having a "nation-state threat actor targeting state organizations".


Symantec, which was the other vendor to issue an alert on the threat actor this week, described it as a fairly advanced cyber espionage group. “This assessment is based in part by their malware, selective targeting, and their ability to go undetected for so long,” says Jon DiMaggio, Sr. Threat Intelligence Analyst for Symantec Security Response.

 The Strider group, which is Symantec’s name for ProjectSauron, is noteworthy for its use of a sophisticated malware tool called Remsec that appears designed primarily for cyber espionage.


in other cybernews, the rumor is that the DNC hack was not a Russian hack but stolen and passed on by a Bernie supporting staffer. And Wikileaks has offered 20 thousand dollars for information on his suspicious death.

place conspiracy theory here.

Medical stuff

links to posts on my medical blog.

Global warming causes anthrax?

warm weather defrosted dead raindeer in Siberia. But the disease goes back a couple of millenia.

ALS or LouGehrig's disease

mainly a link to another article for later reading. The CDC is trying to document the disease to see if it is actually more common now, or just better reported. And checking if the military are affected more than the rest of the population

Polio vaccine mutations and herd immunity.

the oral vaccine can mutate and cause outbreaks if there is no herd immunity. They are now starting to give all kids at least one shot of the dead vaccine to stop this side effect, and hope to wipe out the disease completely.

Hepatitis A outbreak in Hawaii?

Who's not washing their hand properly, or is it the water?

Pharming and Chimeras

Not all experiments placing a few genes from one species into another is unethical (by Catholic and/or traditional ethics standards), but given the ethical collapse of what passes for bioethics, the practice is wrought with danger.

Microcephaly: Maybe it's not just the Zika.

The percentage of microcephaly in Brazilian pregancies was 13 plus percent, but in Colombia and Micronesian outbreaks it was only 1 percent.
Is it a different strain of virus, or was there a chemical problem in the water supply?

Herbal highs.

The latest "high" in the US is an herb sometimes used by farmers in Thailand to get energetic, but can cause abuse/ hallucinations/psychosis if overused.

The problem is not the herb per se, but the overuse of it to get high.

Making up the past

Via SenseOfEvents: 23 reasons why Jesus wasn't a copy of ----------_(place name of pagan god here).

well, another reason is that many of the stories of the gods are obvious examples of fantasy writings ( as in fantasy/sci fi, or myth that teaches truth without being literally true). And great leaders who existed, like Buddha whose life is documented, had parallels, but you could find similar parallels in others who sought for the truth, or are considered saints. Socrates anyone?

Anyone who has lived in a third world village today. I can see Jesus walking around our African villages (or the Philippines 20 years ago (before globalization/modernity got our villages electricity, land reform made our farmers rich enough to own a TV, cellphone, and tricycle, and  changed our small town into a city with a McDonalds and a mall).


This analysis is about the new testament pseudo scholars. For the old testament the problem is fantasy by believers who think the bible is literal history, not oral stories transmitted for quite a few years before written down. (albeit a lot of folks have a similar bias similar to the old fashioned 19th century debunkers that it's all made up, be it Troy or the Exodus. No, the stories were tales based on a historical event but the story was distorted in the telling, so had a basis in history but is about as true as the movie JFK or Abraham Lincoln Vampire hunter.).





more here:



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Movie idea of the day

USA today laments that movies are too negative 

so why not remake the thoughtful films of yesteryear?

I just watched "God is Dead 2", and if it sounded familiar, it is because it is a remake of "Inherit the Wind", with out the propaganda that made the baddies look so stupid as was done in the original film. So it's an okay B film, on a subject that badly needs a decent script that discusses what is going on in Obama's America.

The film posits just quoting scripture  in the context of discussing Martin Luther King would land  you in court?

Isn't that a cultural context, so it would never happen in the USA.

UH OH: NPR laments kids learning the story of Noah's Ark.

that would be funny, except someone pressured a city a couple years ago to remove their "noah's Ark"in the park's playground. The city instead insisted it was not "religious" but celebrating environmentalism, and kept it.

so teach Gilgamesh would be okay? How about Percy Jackson? Thor? King Arthur (except as a non Christian, which he was not)?

A lot of culture depends on basic knowledge of both Christian and Greco Roman heritage. Multi culturalism insists we add Islamic culture and Confucian culture, but this means we ADD this, not push relativism that censors Christianity or portrays anyone "religious" as the same as the Taliban by cherry picking the bad sections.

and yes, the movie brought up the city insisting all pastors submit notes on their sermons: which would sound ridiculous except that this has been done in Texas... with little or no outcry outside the "religious" press.

It has been said that Christian ideas remained alive through 70 years of official atheism in Russia because these were discussed found in Tolstoy and other classic writers of that culture. One suspects that the present day elites will be better at censoring literature, making kids read pop stuff instead of the classis.

Factoid of the day

The only man who survived the seige of the Alamo was a black slave named Joe, owned by Wm Travis, and is why we know a lot of the details of what went on then.

A new book gleans his story from the letters of Travis and others, but it says a lot that he later escaped from slavery but his later history is lost.

The Stories you might have missed

BBC story on the man who stopped a race riot in Birmingham UK after looters ran their car over his son and two others.

When three Asian men were killed in Birmingham protecting businesses from black looters, many feared the city faced a race riot (in 2011). Yet a speech by a grieving father is now credited with almost single-handedly bringing the city back from the brink...

At about 19:30 BST, Mr Jahan faced the world's media outside the petrol station where, hours earlier, his son had lain dead in his arms.

With representatives of the city's black, white, Muslim and Sikh communities standing behind him, he read out a statement calling for calm and for communities to unite.

Then, overcome by emotion, he spoke directly from the heart.

"Basically I lost my son," he told the crowd. "Blacks, Asians, whites - we all live in the same community. Why do we have to kill one another?
"What started these riots? And what's escalated? Why are we doing this? I lost my son. Step forward if you want to lose your sons.
"Otherwise calm down and go home."
Five years later, Mr Jahan admits he was surprised at the impact his words had.
"I don't know where those words at the end came from - they just came out," he said.
"A lot of people said to me 'we can't believe what you said, I don't know where you got the strength'.
"It impacted the public massively. They did walk away." 

and the BBC article today credits the speech as stopping further rioting in that city.


But the story doesn't stop there. Mr Jahan is collecting supplies to help others:And he is now is sending help to refugees in Syria and on Lesbos. from a story in March 2016

Tariq and Sophia have been collecting aid, such as blankets, clothes and toiletries for some time, but nothing prepared them for the scenes of desperation and human misery as thousands of refugees arrived daily.
He said: “It was absolute chaos. I thought it would have been well-organised. It wasn’t. There was no methodical organization dealing with a situation there. They had no funding.”

Tariq Jahan, (left) on aid trip to Lesbos to help Syrian refugees

Loose Lips Sink Ships

Yesterday, there was a story that an Iranian scientist had been executed. He supposedly had been "kidnapped" by the CIA who interrogated him about their nuclear program, but later returned to his own country.

So why execute him? The rumor was that the Mullahs read Hillary's emails.

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an unrelated item is that Trump mentioned countries with terrorism who needed to have their immigrants screened, and the Philippines was on the list, making the local papers and trolls up in arms against him.

Well, except for the Philippine links to the Trade Center Bombing, the OKC bombing, and of course 9-11, there should be no problem with the Philippines.... after all, those links were with terrorists from other lands living in Makati, not locals. Just ignore the "revert" muslim terrorist network in the Tagalog areas, not to mention ISIS starting a franchise here, or that the Mexican cartel is using us to ship drugs.

and no most locals are not upset at Duterte's war on drugs...only the professional church and "civil rights" types, you know: from the elites, whose relatives get rich from corruption...

The Invasion of the Giant Pikachus

King Arthur update

The legend is that King Arthur was born in Tintagal castle... the castle there was, however built a couple centuries later.

Now the UKIndependent reviews archeological evidence that there was indeed a castle dating from that time: it was quite large and had evidence of trade from the Mediterranean.

(I should note that Cornwall was one of the sources of tin so was on the trade routes since ancient times).

alas, it wasn't just the Saxons who caused the decline:

The whole complex appears to have come into existence some time in the 5th or the early 6th century AD – but was probably in decline by the early 7th. So far, no evidence of any catastrophic destruction has been found. However, the latter half of the 6th century and the 7th century were notorious for a terrible plague pandemic (an early version of the later medieval Black Death) which almost certainly devastated parts of Britain after having killed millions throughout the Mediterranean world. 

that would be the Plague of Justinian which decimated the Mediterranean world in 541

The Anglo Saxons had started working as mercenaries after the Romans left in 410, but it wasn't like today, a general takeover but a gradual takeover of the south west and then spread.

Although eastern and much of central Britain had been taken over by Germanic (ie, Anglo-Saxon) conquerors and settlers from what is now Germany and Denmark, much of the west of Britain (including Cornwall) remained under native British control.

The UK, or England for that matter, is not a monolith, which is why some areas wanted Brexit and some areas did not.

Nope. It's a blip, not the god particle

remember all those stories last year insisting that that expensive European machine found the god particle and now can explain the universe? from USA today, in 2013:

Physicists announced Thursday they believe they have discovered the subatomic particle predicted nearly a half-century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape. The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the "God particle.

fast forward and.... uh oh:

Tech Times 2014:
they found a new particle that made them want to rewrite the science books

And voila today, NYTimes report on the Particle that wasn't. It was a blip.

One of the dirty little secret about this is that many of the theories floating out there are more in line with philosophical speculation than with hard data.

David Warren calls these "zombie theories": Instead of observing something and then trying to figure out how it could be explained we have big complicated theories that are based on nothing and scientists claim they are true before there is evidence to prove they are real.

this is not science: This is philosophy.

Video discussions on the problem HERE.

Cat item of the day

How to hold a protest

LesFemmes reports on a BLM demonstration. Read the whole thing.

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my only comment is that she seems unaware that most Muslims are not radicals, but people with a personal relationship to God, i.e. Sufi Islam. although the Saudi trained immans are trying to reeducate them to hate.

The Tears of San Lorenzo

We are having the local fiesta in honor of St Lawrence, so I went to mass last evening at the local neighborhood chapel instead of the larger church in town.

The local Philipino saint is Lorenzo Ruiz, who got martyred when he went to Japan with the Jesuits in medieval times, but our St Lawrence is the deacon who got roasted to death because he refused to tell local officials where he was hiding the church's wealth. When they asked him to point out the riches of the church, he took them into the slums and pointed to the poor people there. As Deacon, in those days his job was that described in Acts: To administer the charitable work so that the apostles could preach and hold the eucharistic services.

So when t the Pope spreads confusion by deciding to "investigate" deconesses, one has to remember that female deacons back then did a similar work of charity, not liturgical work... unless you think dressing  women being immersed for baptism is a work of baptism.

The deaconate gradually evolved, with "brothers" and monks taking over the job of caring for the poor, while deacons became a half step into the priest hood. After Vatican II, deacons were local married men who could hold weddings and funerals and prayer services and baptisms in areas where there was a priest shortage.

The pantssuited new age nuns who are evolving to a higher power, of course, want to be priests, which makes most laypeople shudder. Don't mix them up with the pious nuns who actually do serve the poor. ((Andrew Greeley's satirical novel Virgin and Martyr has a nice picture on the nun fads, but if you read it closely he does include one quiet nun who simply does her work while the main characters are having dramatic stuff going on... I think he is reminding one that these faddish nuns are not the real backbone of the church, even though he wouldn't have a problem with wimen priests who were pious.)

Well, anyway, the feast of St Lawrence is at the same time as the Perseid meteor shower, hence the name "St Lawrence's tears". from the Times of Malta:

Saviour Grech, public relations officer of the Astronomical Society, explained to The Times how a meteor shower is formed: "As night settles this evening our planet silently plunges through the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle, encountering debris left over by the comet each time it approaches the sun, every 130 years. This debris rams into the upper atmosphere at speeds of 60 kilometres per second, causing the air to ionise and shed bright streaks of light as the grain sized particles vaporise. This is what we see as meteors or shooting stars. This meteor shower has been observed for a long time and is known as the Perseid Meteor Shower or Dmugh Ta' San Lawrenz (St Lawrence's tears) in Maltese.

Worth watching if it's not overcast.

And the award winning film "night of the Shooting Stars" is named after this phenomenum. Alas, I heard it was a great movie, but when I watched it I found it was mainly people on all sides busy trying to kill each other  even though the war was almost at an end... or maybe because the war was almost at an end. A pretty film but don't watch it unless you want to be depressed.

YUM! Pigweed

Quinoa is one of the "superfood" fads for the affluent foodies who are now into "paleo" stuff.

Amarathus is a related genus of plant and was actually domesticated by the Paleo Indians in North America.

Archeoblog includes this article that discusses if North American Indians went from gathering the  seeds while hunters to actually domesticating the seeds as a crop.

awhile back, I checked an article on PaleoIndians in the NE of North America which said the archeologists could identify when this was domesticated because the size of the grain in their archological digs got larger, i.e. men (or more likely women) we selecting the larger seeds to plant for a future crop.

But it seems that at one point, corn was introduced, and corn gives you a lot more calories so the seeds were no longer grown for a major food crop, although it did supplement the diet.

Sort of like when I worked in Africa: Most of the dietary calories were from corn meal mush, and corn was introduced by the Portuguese, but most people had a small field of millet or sorghum because it will give a crop if the rains are poor, and they also use it to make beer... and we often advised them to use this to feed their malnourished babies because it was easier to digest than maize.

There are lots of Amaranth species out there, and Wikipedia lists a lot of different folks that use it for food all over the place.

a foodie discusses the Amaranth vs quinoa here, and includes recipes.

and pigweed is an amaranth that is pesticide resistant and you've probably seen it growing in your garden or in the local vacant lot.

wikipedia commons

wikipedia notes:

 The leaves, stems and seeds of Palmer amaranth, like those of other amaranths, are edible and highly nutritious.[1][3] Palmer amaranth was once widely cultivated and eaten by Native Americans across North America, both for its abundant seeds and as a cooked or dried green vegetable.[3] Other related Amaranthus species have been grown as crops for their greens and seeds for thousands of years in Mexico, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, India, and China.

The plant can be toxic to livestock animals due to the presence of nitrates in the leaves.[4] Palmer amaranth has a tendency to absorb excess soil nitrogen, and if grown in overly fertilized soils, it can contain excessive levels of nitrates, even for humans. Like spinach and many other leafy greens, amaranth leaves also contain oxalic acid, which can be harmful to individuals with kidney problems if consumed in excess,.[5]

the Perdue Famine food website has quite a few amaranth species listed

amaranth species



paleoIndian lectures

So remember, preppers, in case of a zombie apocolypse, pigweed is all over the place.

Yes we have fans and a swamp cooler

I should note that I only started using the Aircon during the day when Lolo got sick and stayed most of the day in bed. Before then, he tended to use it for an hour to nap and then went to the farm, when it was cooler, and I just used the fan.

We also have a "swamp cooler" that evaporates water with a fan, in our dining room.

And the fountain in the center of our compound (plus the palm trees) keeps that area cooler than outside.

However, I found that if I run the Aircon on dehumidify using an extra hepa filter, it filters the air too, so I don't need to take a lot of anti histamines for my allergies: which have gotten worse with the increase in traffic (due to the main street now being one way, so our street is the other way).

Yes, I think businesses etc stay too cool, but many of them do this because of the computers. My desktop used to crash over 90 degrees when I lived in Appalachia (We didn't have an aircon because it rarely got hot there... most folks slept on the porch during August when we had a heat wave).

I am not anti green: I am against rich people bossing around ordinary people and making something that is essentially a good thing seem like it is a completely evil thing. Uh, maybe making more efficient airconditioning is the answer?

You can take away my Aircon remote when you pry it from my cold dead hand..

what is it with greens and airconditioners? They are the latest sin in the church in mother Gaia.

photo source: http://airtronicllc.com/what-to-do-when-your-air-conditioner-stops-blowing-cold-air/

 The Pope hates airconditioning, and now the Methodists insist if you want to go to heaven you have to limit your energy use to the equivalent of one ton of CO2 per year.

Bless me father, for I have sinned. I used my airconditioner five times in the last week...


Hah. I'm safe. According to this calculator, I "only" use 500 kg equivalents of CO2  per year for my airconditioner. So I am not sinning (unless I use the car or microwave).

Sigh. I'm old enough to remember when we fasted and refrained from eating our favorite foods during Lent and gave the money saved to charity.

Prayer has now been replaced with "oom" with belly button gazing, kneeling replaced with yoga, fasting is now dieting, and mortification is not offering one's simple mental and physical sufferings to the Lord, but now we have to increase our daily discomfort by risking heat exhaustion from refraining from using our airconditioning.

Well, anyway, the British green types are getting their knickers in a knot because some there are buying and using airconditioners.

The left wing UKGuardian article of course starts with aiming at their usual target: Those greedy Yanks:

The United States has long consumed more energy each year for air conditioning than the rest of the world combined. In fact, we use more electricity for cooling than the entire continent of Africa, home to a billion people, consumes for all purposes. ...

Uh, I've lived in Africa, and the reason they don't use a lot of energy is that they are poor and don't have a choice in the matter.

Why do I say this? Because as the article points out: Uh oh: Those dang Chinese are getting rich and buying Airconditioners too:

The number of U.S. homes equipped with air conditioning rose from 64 to 100 million between 1993 and 2009, whereas 50 million air-conditioning units were sold in China in 2010 alone. And it is projected that the number of air-conditioned vehicles in China will reach 100 million in 2015, having more than doubled in just five years.

Blame Capitalism.

So what do these folks suggest? Jimmy Carter, in the days of the gas embargo encouraged letting our pipes freeze by keeping the heat down in our homes and wearing a sweater.

So what do we do about keeping cool?

Nowadays, Dustbury notes that the "experts" are encouraging going naked in the home to keep cool.

Ah, but this won't work for Okies, where the average August Temperature is a high of 93 degrees.... as Dustbury quips:

I assure you, here on the Roasted Prairie, nobody’s turning off the air conditioning, whether or not they’re dressed.

The UKGuardian article cited above has a couple paragraphs on the good old days when people went outside and socialized with their neighbors when it was hot out.

yes, and crime went up, old people died of high blood pressure, heart attacks and heat exhaustion.

Aside from keeping people comfortable, cutting down elderly deaths, decreasing crime, and incresasing productivity at work and school, there are other benefits: as MomJones Points out, the reason the US won't have a Zika epidemic is that people in the southern USA tend to stay indoors in the evening (when mosquitoes are most likely to bite) thanks to airconditioning.

The Olympics are on!

And DaveBarry is reporting:

There has been one scary story after another from Brazil.

One of the scariest, of course, is the threat of the Zika virus, which, as I understand it, is a disease you get if you are bitten by a mosquito that is not wearing a condom. I personally am not too worried about Zika, because (a) to the best of my knowledge, I am not currently pregnant; and (b) I live in Miami, which — being a modern, sophisticated, international trendsetter city — already HAS Zika.

But I am worried about the water down here. As the headline above notes, there are dead bodies and human feces floating around. And that’s in the Olympic swimming pool.

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and no, I don't tend to watch sports on TV...

Remembering victims of terrorism

another day, another vigil for those who were killed by a terrorist

People offer flowers for the victims at the Tsukui Yamayuri En care facility in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, on Sunday. | KYODO

the killer had been hospitalized for mental illness and had been a heavy drug user.


Wikipedia report.


NDY reports Disability advocates in the US are holding an "on line" vigil to remember those who died.

the murderer released a letter insisting that it should be legal to kill such people, echoing the coming PC propaganda that so far has been subtle.

Buddhism sometimes sees disability as a punishment for past lives, and will gain merit by patient endurance of their suffering, but also sees caring for the disabled as a good deed that will release you from the cycle of reincarnation.

The letter from the murderer, however, used the language of some modern bioethicists, that society would be better off without them. from dailyLife(au)

A man prays at a makeshift altar in front of the Tsukui Yamayuri En care centre for the disabled in Sagamihara, Japan.Photo: The Asahi Shimbun

Part of his chilling letter read: My reasoning is that I may be able to revitalise the world economy and I thought it may be possible to prevent World War III. I envision a world where a person with multiple disabilities can be euthanised, with an agreement from the guardians, when it is difficult for the person to carry out household and social activities.I believe there is still no answer about the way of life for individuals with multiple disabilities. The disabled can only create misery. I think now is the time to carry out a revolution and to make the inevitable but tough decision for the sake of all mankind. Let Japan take the first big step.

but the author notes that this is an opinion that is increasingly popular in modern society:

Disability activist Sam Connor noticed, too. "In the wake of other mass murders and hate crimes, there were outpourings of public grief, rallying of communities, shows of solidarity. After Japan - perhaps the only mass hate crime where the killer had clearly signalled his intention to 'euthanise' hundreds of disabled people prior to the event - there was nothing," she said. "Nobody is speculating whether views like those of Peter Singer, who advocates for infanticide against disabled babies and the killing of disabled people, have contributed to this tragedy and whether this is the inevitable conclusion of expressing views about disability genocide."

Is this why the story tends to be ignored in the west? Because they are disabled, or because only murderers with politically incorrect motives are demonized by the MSM?

 Connor also speculates on the way the victims have not been mentioned - perhaps because in Japan, disability is considered as shameful. "It's almost worse that nobody is speaking about it. No names, no mass laying of flowers. It's disability erasure. Those victims, it is like they never existed", she said. The idea that the lives of disabled people are worthless is not a new one. The media may be tempted to portray this attack as a random incident; something that, unlike the lone wolf inspired by ISIS, is not part of a broader ideology or pattern. Not something we need to worry about. 

except a lot of people are encouraged to off themselves, and one suspects many more are killed than are reported to the police.

People with disability are at greater risk of violence than the general population, in Australia and internationally. Most of my friends with disabilities have been told we should kill ourselves at some point of my life. I've even been told this on a date. Others are told this by strangers. Disabled people are scared. And we have every reason to be.

This HastingsCenter report shows how the attitude that the disabled are better off dead is alas getting to be more common, albeit usually as pressure toward "non treatment" decisions for a a person who is merely disabled, not dying.

Non treatment at the end of life is a subtle thing: you chose not to kill, but to keep the person in comfort while avoiding extraordinary and painful medical treatment.

But "offering" this to a person who is merely sick or disabled actually is a way to pressure them into suicide. Often they are already tired, depressed, and discouraged, and see this as telling them they should die because no  one wants them to live.

But of course, behind it is all that money you can save... just google about all that money spent on disability payments.

One is reminded of the quip: They know the price of everything but the value of nothing...

Yes, but behind each disability payment is a story.

the only answer to this is religious: The idea that life is precious to the one "whose eye is on the sparrow", but also the idea that everything happens for a purpose, even suffering...

Family news

we just got back from the funeral mass for the cook's son, a teacher at the local high school.

The church was packed with kids and relatives and friends.

I used my age as an excuse to leave toward the end of the service. Actually, I tend to faint in hot crowded churches, and it's not age, it's been that way all my life.

After church, everyone will go to the gravesite for a short ceremony. Most folks march on the street with the coffin, and some will take cars or tricycles to the cemetery. A sad day for the family.

Instead of going to the cemetery, we went to a restaurant for a snack then home. The custom here is to eat on the way home from a funeral (The custom started with a superstition that if the dead spirit follows you, he'll stop off at the restaurant and bother them instead of following you home).

Ruby has class pictures and a party to go to at her school tomorrow, so they will leave later this afternoon for Manila. She is dressing up as Mary Poppins for the party. She had planned to dress up as one of the Suicide Squad, but decided she'd better not, since it is a strict Christian school.

The Suicide Squad is the next big thing for teenagers: Another one of the Marvel/comic book universe, but the movie plot seems to be a makeover of the Dirty Dozen meets the punks.

On the other hand, most plots are not original. I was just reading Ibsen's play The Enemy of the People, and realized the reason that the plot sounded familiar was that it was essentially Jaws. Of course, punishing the one warning a town of danger goes back to Laocoon,...

In other news, we will now have a curfew here for kids: It is to stop drugs and violence.

Do they still have this in the USA? I am old enough to remember when we had to be home by midnight unless we had an adult with us, and we couldn't drive after midnight if we were under 18.

Well, the critics are getting up in arms over the druggies being killed, often by vigilanties who seek "pay back" against those who harmed a relative, but the policy remains popular.

And although most of the drugs kingpins were linked to China, we are also a transshipment site for the Mexican cartels, because they viewed it safe to export via the Philippines than through the US due to the drug war there.

Finally, I read the gov't, who sponsors organic rice and veggies (note: we grow there) is now planning to push organic chicken.

This would be good, if the prices stay high enough to make a profit. In the early 1990's we got into the broiler chicken business, but rarely made a profit due to cheaper imports from VietNam etc. Then our chicken houses were flattened by the typhoon that ruined our rice crop a few years ago. Luckily the farmer had just harvested the chickens so we didn't have to bury 5000 dead chickens. But we decided not to rebuild the chicken houses, So we are no longer in the "chicken" business. Instead we use that land (which is on a hill and not good for growing rice) to process our rice (drier, rice mill, and store palay/fertilizer etc).

We had a house up on the hill and Lolo and I used to stay there a lot, until our nephew was killed by a rogue NPA unit hired by the ex mayor. When we left, we held a dinner that included neighbors and those with NPA connections to show we knew they weren't behind the murder. But later that year, the government sent the military to the area, inspected everyone on the road, arrested some and killed a fewe others, so since then they have been quiet (I think). Actually, I have avoided the farm for years, because Lolo's son was busy wasting money in constructing a house/conference center there that is rarely used, and I just had to hold my tongue in wrath to see the money wasted. Sigh..

Stories below the fold

Space junk is a problem, but there is a plan to clean it up. From DavidReneke'sblog:

Funded by the European commission to the tune of around €13m (£10.9m), the RemoveDebris mission is set to be one of the world’s first mission to test systems for capturing junk in space. While a full-scale mission is likely to cost significantly more, Forshaw believes it is a necessary expense. “The reality is you are spending a small amount now to prevent huge disasters from occurring in the future,” he said. Source:  The Guardian

an alternative to MegaMaid:




hmm... in the background there is a corrider with a big sign "Area 6"... No, it's not referring to the Drone testing secret airbase in Nevada, but the Hollywood Hills area of LA where a lot of film types live.
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The Good News:
StrategyPage says: No, men returning to Europe after fighting with ISIS don't commit terrorism.

The bad news: The train and recruit locals to commit terrorism.

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The "Ich Klage An"/MeBeforeYou propaganda deluge continues:

Follow the money: Caring for elderly stroke victims costs (the US) 40 billion dollars. states an article in the UKMail based on a US university expert's opinion.

How did they get this figure? They estimate 11 thousand dollars a week is the price of caregiving each person.

According to numbers crunched by the University of Michigan, each of America's 6.5 million stroke survivors need around $11,000 in care and treatment each week. That accounts for 22.3 hours of help eating, bathing, cooking, cleaning, and having doctors appointments. It is a dramatic leap in cost compared to previous estimates. 

If that number sounds a bit high, it is because it calculates to over $400 dollars an hour for the caregivers.

Reality check:

Nursing homes coast about 200 dollars a day, plus more for rehab, which of course is stopped after a set time.

So that amount might be true for the acute care and rehab of a recent stroke in a nursing home, but not for chronic care, and especially not for the people cared for by family or friends at home.


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I just rescued three kittens from the vacant lot, and then one of the feral cats had three kittens in the spare bedroom.

Oh well.

Cats rule.

Follow the money

The Cardinal who was cleaning up the Vatican bank got fired and now is being "investigated" for 20 year old accusations he covered up pedophilia, which he denies. An Australian paper reports:

Vatican efforts to put its finances in order initially accelerated after Pope Francis’s election in 2013. But an economic reform commission he established has since been disbanded and three of its members are currently on trial with the journalists.

Moves to have all the Vatican books externally audited have also been a start-stop affair. PricewaterhouseCoopers were appointed in December to do the job by powerful Australian cardinal George Pell, the head of the Vatican’s economic secretariat.

But PwC’s $3 million contract was suspended last week on the orders of a rival department, the secretariat of state, leaving Pell “a little surprised.”

I don't know if the child abuse accusations are true, but they do come at a convenient time.

The corruption of the Vatican Bank is a major scandal no one is covering... maybe because it is a "MEGO" type story where "facts" are not available, whistleblowers are suicided, and of course, only C2C am (link2) will cover the unsubstantiated rumors.

Ah, but that is the tip of the iceburg.


 What is the Clinton foundation, and where does the money go?

SenseofEvents posts this:

Right wing editorial says they launder money, and ironically, in Snopes the only correction is to say an email about the foundation was not written by Charles Krauthammar, but no facts on the claim itself.

WaPost article from January on the Haitian mess: a lot of the wasted/mis spent money was from taxpayers, not the CF.

NPR Summary here. actually mainly quotes the foundation folks explaining they might have made minor mistakes, but hey everyone makes similar mistakes, so just ignore that Reuter's report.

The Atlantic has an article on the foundation's political fingers:

Republicans and Democrats have their respective (if sometimes overlapping) fundraising bases. Very rich individuals sometimes support a given candidate. And then there's Hillary Clinton, whose relationship to money is even more complicated.

Her family's foundation is one complicating factor. "The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration," the Washington Post reported last month.
That conflict of interest was inappropriate for a cabinet secretary

My summary: All the political parties get money from rich guys/corporations, so why worry if the legal bribes and kickbacks go through the Clinton foundation instead of direct contributions that the MSM ignores anyway?

Again check out c2c clone for this summary.
Also Fox news Business dared to cover it.



oh look: Trump insulted a Democratic operative who promotes sharia law and Muslim Immigration
A gold star parents whose son died a hero.

presumably Trump will soon be attacked by other Democratic operatives mothers of military heroes.
so the press can continue their propaganda flood fair and balanced coverage of the campaign while
Pat Smith can be insulted by Hillary and this story ignored by the press.

Just another "cecil the lion" story to hype as the two minute hate on facebook..

A lot of Hillary's shenanigans resemble a certain lovely ex president, a class mate of Bill Clinton, who will remain nameless...

The elites take care of their own, of course: notice that when she got into trouble, the lawyer wife of a certain movie star and Clinton supporter went to the UN to get her off.

 .. no they couldn't prove anything, maybe because a lot of the money was given to her husband, witnesses are threatened, and remember, most "whistle blowers" also have taken bribes in the past so would be prosecuted themselves if they spill the bean.

what is that expression: she came to do good and did very well indeed.

or as Lolo used to say: They're all crooks.

as for Jesus' opinion: He'd say: been there, done that:

The important stories behind the headlines

An Asian "herbal" medicine is being abused by kids as an opiate substitute:

CDC Report. suggests the problem is with overdoses and when mixed with alcohol or other drugs.

more on Mitragyna at wikipedia.
It is commonly used in Thailand and Malaysia

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

Darth Vader: A role model for Navy Commanders?

... (In The Empire Strikes Back) Darth Vader solves all the biggest bureaucratic problems that face our Navy today. In fact, we should all strive to be more like this Dark Lord of the Sith. 
 After reviewing constant Galactic Internet content about why his Imperial Officers were leaving service early to go be nerf herders or moisture farmers, Darth Vader made it fun to be in the Imperial Navy again. 
 Despite his unnatural inclinations towards the Dark Side of the Force, Darth Vader leaves us with valuable lessons on how to properly solve problems facing today's Navy.

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LATimes reports many homeowners are trying to be "Green" by replacing their lawns with gravel and desert plants.

UH OH:

some experts warned that Angelenos’ zeal to use less water in the backyard would ultimately make the city warmer.

“Gardens and lawns act as air conditioning for L.A., which is only getting hotter with climate change,” landscape designers Mia Lehrer, Claire Latané and Margot Jacobs wrote in a 2015 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. “Plants and trees provide shade and transpire moisture to cool the air; gravel and artificial turf don't.

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Follow the money: BLM is not about justice, it's about the activists who supervise the program getting rich.

Of course, maybe the money won't be funneled through the "activist" organizations: it might merely be another huge bureaucracy handing out money.

Given that the BLM (bureau of land management) stole almost a billion dollars from Native Americans, from the compensations to Native Americans, maybe the BLM (black lives matter) activists should notice such a program might not help those who are supposed to get the loot.



Ironically, President Obama shouldn't be eligible: His African ancestors never were slaves in the US, but both his American and African ancestors did own slaves...

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My nasty comment of the day:

Yes, I'll pay slavery reparations as soon as I get back the family farm in County Mayo...

related comment: Did I tell you that when I visited County Mayo, that much of the area has gone back to oak forest. So I guess the greens are happy. Just ignore the one million deaths from disease and starvation.

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and forget the threat that Russian hackers or Isis terrorists might shut down the power grid:

The real enemy is hiding in plain sight:

Dave Barry notes:

THEY ARE OPENLY MOCKING US As of July of this year we squirrels (and our fellow animal operatives) have conducted over 1,400 unclassified operations that have resulted in aggregate of more than 67 days without power, affecting over 3.6 million people.

Mindfulness or hypnosis

The gurus of "mind body" medicine are essentially pushing hypnosis to cure people. 

When I learned medical hypnosis, we were taught that "Mindfulness", yoga, jogging, the prayer of quiet, painting, playing music, acting,and watching a movie are all forms of "deep concentration" that is physiologically related to hypnosis.

And various people have different abilities to be hypnotized. And a person's ability to be hypnotized can be measured by having them look up while closing their eyes: The amount of "white" seen during this exercize correlates with one's ability to enter into a trance state.

Artistic people tend to be easily hynotized; nerds with concrete scientific thinking are not. Most people fall into the middle catagory, where deep concentration can be taught so one can increase one's ability to use this technique.

Next time you watch a movie, check out the eyes of the actors: Many actors essentially "become" the part they play by entering into deep concentration/ trance/ "as if"...
"

NYTimes article on hypnosis suggests it is a neurophysiological s"betate. This has been know for years, but now the scans prove it.

a good article, but doesn't mention that the ability differs in different people.

Yup. The Beeb is biased

I;m reviewing the headlines on the newsfeed of the BBC and I see four eight anti Trump headlines. And no pro Trump headlines.

Check out this analysis, which purports to be an analysis of foreign policy of both candidates but is actually a dump job against Trump:

 It is hard to remember a candidate as out of step with the existing foreign policy mainstream as the Republican contender Donald Trump.His views on Russia, on Nato, on Muslims, Mexico - you name it - are at variance with the policies that have dominated US foreign policy thinking for decades.

Yeah. Democracy is a bitch, ain't it.

But then I am old enough to remember when the British press painted Reagan as dumb and a warmonger who would cause WWIII.

The BBC also have articles on some shootings in Austin: Nothing big, just the usual Saturday night fights that every major city sees and has seen since I became a doc.

So why publicize two Austin murders and ignore the carnage in Chicago? I think it has to do with the open carry law in Texas...

Nothing there about the war games in the west Philippine sea, or about their sabre rattling. But they do note the problems with Chinese construction of a nuclear plant in the UK

China will not tolerate "unwanted accusations" about its investments in the UK after the delay of the Hinkley nuclear power project, the country's state-run news agency has said. Xinhua said it could not understand the "suspicious approach that comes from nowhere to Chinese investment".

It follows reports suggesting the UK PM has national security concerns about China's role in the project. Officially the Chinese government said it hoped for a speedy resolution.

Uh, isn't this a Chinese private company being accused, so why is the government threatening the UK?

 and if you read the article you find this Trump like quote:

Carrie Gracie, the BBC's China editor, said the Chinese government "is on the horns of a dilemma".
"It is frustrated by the uncertainty over its future in the UK's nuclear energy industry and it is angered by suggestions that the reason for the delay may be the prime minister's reported concerns about the national security implications of a Chinese role in critical infrastructure," she said

.

Putting the UK first? ya think?

Oil Wars: The hungry people you didn't read about

There is an oil price war going on in the world, and it is partly a plan (Saudis overpumping to bankrupt Iran and to bankrupt the shale oil industry in the USA) but it is also affecting the economies of a lot of poor countries, from Iran to Russia to Venezuela to Nigeria.

(it is also helping economies that use oil, like the Philippines, where prices are low and mean the poor can cook with LPG and gas for threshers/handplows/transport is cheaper for rice growers like ourselves).

But one of the negative problems that hasn't hit the headlines yet is the recent cut backs in oil production in Saudi, resulting in a lot of foreign workers being laid off.

From MigrantRights:

In what is dubbed a ‘humanitarian crisis’, there are at least 10,000 stranded Indians who work for Saudi Oger company. Latheef Thechy, an Indian social worker in Riyadh, and his friends are carrying out extensive relief work, using Whatsapp groups to coordinate food collection and follow up the cases. Indian Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj has appealed to the 30,00,000 (3 million)-strong Indian community in Saudi to help the stranded workers.

more HERE.
heh: Breitbart is there too...

And yes, this will affect the Philippines:

CNN Philippines article from Feb 2016 notes that 50 thousand OFW could lose their jobs.

and Interaksyon (July 2016) says many are asking for gov't help to get out

Thousands of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), who lost their jobs after mass layoffs in Saudi Arabia, appealed to President Rodrigo Duterte for their repatriation. Due to the negligence suffered by the stranded Filipino workers, the labor attaches of Riyadh and Jeddah were relieved from their posts.

Most of the distressed OFWs have not received their wages for many months. Some had received exit visas but were unable to return to the Philippines due to lack of plane fare. Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) Secretary Silvestre Bello III, together with other government officials, flew into the Arab kingdom last week to assess the situation of the OFWs, most of whom are packed in a temporary shelter set up by DOLE.

this article estimates the number as 11 thousand OFW's, but  notes most of them hope to stay in Saudi and get another job.

Reality check: If they come home, there are no jobs.

Duterte was elected in hopes to clean up corruption (and drugs, since they are related). If corruption is decreased, then industry will move here, and many skilled workers will return home.

Quotes of the day

Algore and the Pope don't like Airconditioning,  but MomJones notes that it may be one reason Zika won't stpread in the USA

Compared with, say, Puerto Ricans, mainland Americans are also protected by our lifestyle. People in the Deep South tend to have air conditioning and screens on their windows. ..... We spend more time indoors, out of the heat. And all of this helps minimize contact with the mosquitoes.

(Italics mine) yeah, in Oklahoma, even my poor patients had at least one Airconditioner.

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Instapundit links to a CNN article claiming if you eat more meat, you have a shorter life.

and comments: That's just what the cows want us to think.

But actually, it was based on a population study of American health care professionals, with more woman than men, presumably who have more education and a different ethnic bias than the general population. In other words, a snapshot of nutrition but may not prove anything because of population bias.

I dropped out of that study because I found I couldn't remember what I ate and tended to "guess", and realized I was biasing my answers not on what I ate but what I was supposed to eat. So presumably there might be a reporting bias, or a bias toward those with OCD who actually remember and document these things accurately.

But you know, in Africa, you could tell the educated, because they were taller than their cohorts thanks to school meals. And my sons were taller than their Colombian raised siblings, and the contrast was even more stark when we visited a Ecuador a couple miles away from where they lived. We see a similar height disparity among our farmers vs their kids.

This is due to increase protein in the diet, of course.

 And another dirty little secret: People with low protein diets don't get heart disease, don't live long enough to get cancer, and die a lot easier of infectious diseases, especially the children.

BBC article on the history of how tall people are. notes the disease/nutrition changes that led to taller people.
However, when they discuss very very tall people as if they were healthy variants (most of them have diseases such as pituitary malfunctions) they are obscuring the discussion. and their Darwinian bias about short short poor people having too many kids is just that: Bias. The dirty little secret is that countries where there is enough to eat, that babies live tend to live and grow taller than mom....and that moms knowing this tend to choose to have fewer babies..., and even in the Philippines, in the last generation, the birth rate has gone down from six to almost 2.


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

DavidWarren has the "globalization is good for you" quote of the day:

 “Any one reading the chronicles will find that since the birth of Christ there is nothing that can compare with what has happened in our world during the last hundred years. Never in any country have people seen so much building, so much cultivation of the soil. Never has such good drink, such abundant and delicate food, been within the reach of so many. Dress has become so rich that it cannot in this respect be improved. Who has ever heard of commerce such as we see it today? It circles the globe; it embraces the whole world! Painting, engraving — all the arts — have progressed and are still improving. More than all, we have men so capable, and so learned, that their wit penetrates everything in such a way, that nowadays a youth of twenty knows more than twenty doctors did in days gone by.” 

and he notes dryly:

 This paean to globalization was (purportedly) written by Martin Luther...

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Will "Me before you" inspire copycat suicides? Of course: That's the idea. Think of all the money you will save!

MBY is not about living with quadriplegia, as quadriplegic John Kelly points out:

 “Book and screenplay author JoJo Moyes admits she knows nothing about quadriplegics,” said Kelly, “yet her ignorance is allowed to promote the idea that people like me are better off dead. 

Italics mine.
and he adds:

No one’s suicide should be treated noble and inspirational. Our suicides should be viewed as tragedies like anyone else’s.”s should be viewed as tragedies like anyone else’s.”

Ah, but not in Hollywood, where it will get you an academy award.

Doctors have warned for years that press and media stories that paint sympathetic stories of suicide actually increase the suicide rate. (The same thing could be said about terrorist attacks of course).

But the real danger is that it will inspire crazies to kill the disabled because they think they are better off dead, as was done last week in Japan, or worse, to make it normal to put a disabled or elderly person on a death pathway because the doctor decides an disabled person is better off dead, (as opposed to those who are truly dying, where comfort care with lots of narcotics and non treatment decisions are appropriate)...

Follow the money: From the UKMail article on the abuse of the terminal care protocol (aka the Liverpool pathway) in the UK.

and follow the money:

We also revealed how some hospitals were being paid six-figure ‘bribes’ to meet targets about the numbers of patients on the LCP – leading to fears that doctors were put under pressure to use the pathway. 

another sign that TEOTWAWKI is nigh

Paradise Helicopters

LINK

headsup DaveBarry

Family news

the tropical cyclone that was supposed to hit us turned north before turning east to cause havoc in China. So all we had was some rain. And it is still overcast here.

Since the Philippine averages 12 typhoons each year, we await the next one.

The cook's son will be buried Thursday. We visited yesterday before school left out, since a lot of the students will be there to visit after school hours.

Another day, another typhoon

Heavy rain showers this morning.  It's not really a typhoon yet, just a "tropical cyclone".

we are Signal One. Mainly heavy rains. The roads will probably flood and Joy has a meeting in Manila but I haven't checked if she is still going.

Hope th roof doesn't leak...

and it must be wet outside: The feral cats are all inside avoiding the weather.., not just in the kitchen but in the spare bedroom.