The grand kids have arrived: The last one's plane arrived at midnight so they got here at 4 am.
They are just waking up now: One will have to get a white teeshirt to wear underneath his barong: a white shirt worn over trousers that is formal wear in this country. He is in the wedding party.
Our nephew's wedding is this afternoon: 2 pm followed by a big party where food will be overflowing. Presumably someone will bring me food from the overflow, since I am not quite up to attending a long ceremony and party.
The good news is that Kuya's daughter will be teaching in Manila for the next year: English and Philipino literature.
So after six years away from home she will be able to spend her weekends here.
I am fond of haiku, and the poetry blog FirstKnownWhenLost has a discussion of Haiku, as translated and interpreted by the scholar RH Blyth.
This spring I once again returned to Blyth's wondrous creation: revisiting old favorites, being reminded of haiku I had once read but had forgotten, and making new discoveries.
A pear tree in bloom:
In the moonlight,
A woman reading a letter.
Buson (1716-1784) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Blyth, Haiku, Volume II: Spring (Hokuseido Press 1950), page 323.
A night of stars;
The cherry blossoms are falling
On the water of the rice seedlings.
Buson (translated by R. H. Blyth), Ibid, page 170.
the blogpost notes the book about Haiku by the author RH Blyth which translates and explains the Haiku.
everything else on the internet news etc seems to be hyperventillating about stuff with a critical eye, so I thought I might try to step back and contemplate beauty and unlike a lot of modern poetry, which seems to be political or so obscure that dunderheads like myself can't understand WTF they are talking about, Haiku paints a picture of beauty in one's head, while taking us outside of our own trivial troubles.
The reason for prayer, silence, or meditation on beauty is not to escape from life's problems, but to be strenghtened and to put things into perspective so we can live in hope when facing the travails of life.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
This week, Christians celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration, where the thick headed apostles were given a glimpse of Christ's glory. The feast is most important to Orthodox Christians, who stress mystical aspects of the faith, but there is a lesson even for those of us who are practical minded and often forget this part of religion is important also, because it feeds the soul so we have the strenght to hope.
.
There are moments of intimacy, of serenity, of peace, of nearness to God, which everyone has known and wished to prolong. ...
Susanna Wesley had a prayer: "Help me, Lord, to remember that religion is not to be confined to the church or closet, nor exercised only in prayer and meditation, but that everywhere I am in thy presence." The moment of glory does not exist for its own sake; it exists to clothe the common things with a radiance they never had before.
So I am reading StrategyPage: their analysis on countries where I have personal knowledge of what is going on at the grass roots level usually agrees with what I know.
and their news is good: Peace is breaking out all over. Or at least a lot of countries that had nasty wars/insurgencies are now pretty well peaceful.
They note that in the Philippines the local insurgencies are pretty well calmed down: Not just the local communists (who now have morphed back into peaceful activists or decided to use their killing skills on the market as hit men). but also the Muslim insurgencies, where the moderate Islamicists were given political power so have to fight their extremist elements. Long analysis at link.
and the really good news that you probably haven't read: this is not just happening in the Philippines: a lot of those nasty small wars have calmed down:
Since StrategyPage began in 1999 we’ve retired more wars than we’ve added. As we have noted frequently, the trend since the 1990s has been fewer wars. Those we have retired since 1999 include Haiti (2009), Nepal (2010), Sri Lanka (2010), Central Asia (2012), Ivory Coast (2012), Indonesia (2013), Chad (2013), Uganda (2013), Kurds (2013), Philippines (2023), Rwanda (2013), Balkans (2013), Ethiopia (2013), Congo Brazzaville (2013), Colombia (2017), Mexico (2017), Myanmar (2020), Algeria (2020), Sudan (2020) and Thailand (2020). Some of these former updates included nearby conflicts that also ended, like Micronesia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
So we have a lot of problems in the world, but there is now hope:
Here in central Luzon, there is a lot of building going on, both homes and new shops (and a new mall) being opened.
the government is fixing our roads: during the shutdown, there was little traffic and a lot of local money went to help the poor with food or medicine. But now the roads are full of heavy trucks again: Rice trucks coming from the farms, trucks with dirt/fill or gravel for new construction, fresh food delivery trucks, trucks delivering processed food and stuff to the local palenke or shops here in the town center (the malls are on the outskirts as are the newer gated communities).
the weight of the trucks is causing the older roads to crack and chip, so they are gradually repairing/ reinforcing the roadways, and fixing the sewers/drainage ditches so that the streets don't flood every time we have heavy rain.
The electric wires are being replaced with cables and transformers, meaning fewer spaghetti wires sagging to get ensnared by the rice trucks.
Schools have reopened after being on line or using notebooks for two years: and several local students have come to ask for money to buy school supplies since the new school year is to open in August for the next year.
The government decided to make 12 years schooling mandated, but a lot of kids can't afford it so they considering making it only 10 years.
the main problem is paying for medicine: the government funding has a local free clinic run by a nurse practitioner, but often they run out of free rabies shots, or the kids need antibiotics and the very poor can't even afford the five dollars for a course of antibiotics. (average minimum wage is 8 dollars a day, but farmers are often cash poor until the harvest comes in). I let the cook triage them: she knows everyone in this area of town and turns away the scammers and druggies, but if they are poor, she asks me to give them small donation to help pay for the medicine.
there has been a small upsurge in covid: But the numbers are still minimal: 14 deaths reported yesterday. Lots of diarrhea and "broncho" (chest infections) in small kids, and the usual deaths of the elderly from high blood pressure or diabetes or old age.
But Pres Marcos declared the end of the epidemic so everything is now open and no mask required. The gov't has the bivalent covid vaccine and is encouraging people to get it, but there is a lot of "vaccine hesitency" out there: when the epidemic hit, people knew people dying of covid so were eager to get the shot, but now people figure there is herd immunity and that the omicron varient isn't fatal anyway so no shots unless required for school or the job.
So life is almost back to normal, the way it was before covid. And that is the good news too.
every once in awhile, I run across a film that is not about murder, special effects, or superheroes, but a story about ordinary people.
Imagine that: films about ordinary people still exist.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is about an older man who hears an acquaintance is dying of cancer, and decides to walk to her hospice to say goodbye, and tells her to stay alive until he arrives.
During his walk, he gets help from strangers, publicity, and finally becomes open to mourning the death of his only son.
And when he arrives, his friend is dying and unable to speak, so he leaves her a crystal to hang in the window: one of those crystals that make rainbows from the light. And the film ends with his reconciliation with his wife, and the small rainbows appearing to all those he met, who were given hope by his pilgrimage.
so a nice movie to watch with your loved ones when the world seems to be falling apart at the scenes.
big family reunion at the wedding of one of our cousins. Joy will pick up two of Robin's kids Friday, and some of the other relatives are here already. They will be married at our local church and then have a big party at a local venue.
I visited some of them today but will probably skip the wedding: I am getting stronger (hey, I made it through mass on Sunday) but not up to the party.
Is it post Dengue syndrome or old age? since I am recovering slowly I suspect it is the former.
In the meanwhile, there might be a rice problem here: kuya will be replanting the fields next week if the fields dry out a bit. (no typhoon in the forcast so only monsoon rains to cope with).
this will continue until the harvest in the fall. To make things worse, some countries are limiting rice exports (e.g. India)
While traders expected the mid-October harvest season in the region to boost local supply, rice prices would not likely go down because of existing rice export restrictions from India that have been keeping up the rice prices coming from Vietnam, a major source of rice imported to the Philippines, said Bacus.
Diesel is going up (used for farm machinery, drying, milling, and transporting rice to market) meaning that the price of rice will go up for consumers and our profit margin will shrink.
El Niño and the damage left by Typhoon #EgayPH have become a key concern of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. who said the Philippines would have to import rice again. Read this story by @AdrianINQ to know more. #INQFocushttps://t.co/bo2Zgf9NgG
and in the meanwhile, China is increasing their aggression against the Philippines in the west Philippine sea.
With the US showing weakness, and China having internal problems with floods and corruption, will they decide to pull a wag the dog scenerio?
The #CCP has declared a “people’s war” war on #America—a declaration with great significance in #China—so we should acknowledge the situation and declare that regime to be our “enemy.” This determination would, among other things, facilitate application of our treason statute.
a couple of years ago, I watched the miniseries John Adams to learn about the US Revolution.
And they have a short segment when Abigail innoculates her kids with a mild case of small pox to protect them from getting a full blown case of the disease.
this was before Jenner discovered innoculating a person with cowpox would give you immunity: Before then, the only prevention was innoculation. of the actual smallpox germ: which could of course kill you but usually only give you a mild version of the disase.
And there is an argument that Washington saved the revolution because he ordered all of his men to get innoculated before joining the army fighting near Boston which was in the middle of an epidemic.
such films are a way to teach history, but still when we see a major TV commentator be clueless (and no one dares to correct him) it makes one wonder about the vericity of American news programs.
We had two typhoons pass us up north, and then they hit China.
We got rain, but apparently China got hit badly with rain.
Is the US MSM following the floods in China?
and the floods hit about the same time there are rumors of problems with the military and big shot politicians.
from a Chinese site
Yup. it's from the typhoon the went north of here and destroyed the extreme north of Luzon. Nothing new with this: happens all the time.
But although we didn't get a direct hit here in central Luzon, and resulted in heavy monsoon rains being sucked into our area and flooding our rice fields. Then a second typhoon went way north and again gave us heavy monsoon rains, but hit China but no wind here.
since the monsoon rains were being sucked in from the west, it was/is hitting Pampanga and Bulacan more than our area,
Pagasa tells residents living near Angat river basin in Bulacan to prepare for possible floods. https://t.co/r023OdJ0CE
and the real problem is that the irrigation dams could overtop and collapse. When this threatens, they open the dam to lower the water level, and you get mild flooding instead of a deluge.
But they are preparing: They put the signs up with arrows to the nearby city gym, which is our evacuation center. The low lying houses of the poorer neighborhood near the river are frequently flooded and even destroyed from previous flooding. Usually folk move in with neighbors and friends but some have to to the evac centers.
Our house is two feet above street level, and has a second floor, so we should be okay. The last time we flooded, it was when they opened the gates to lower the water, and we got 3 inches inside the house. The street however had a foot of water, and the neighbors asked if they could move their cars and trucks into our garage and storage areas to protect the engines.
The real problem with the flooding/heavy rain is that the newly planted rice will be flooded or wash away. It is early enough in the season to replant, of course, but that is one more expense at a time when diesel, fertilizer, etc prices are high and it costs more to get a crop.
When it dries a bit we will have to replant a lot of the seedling rice that got washed away. Sigh.
so I wonder if this also means crop damage to China's rice fields.
Then we have other rumors coming out of China that might or might not mean anything:
and
more confusion in Chinese politics
Sigh. In our prayers.
One does hope that China won't decide to start a war to distract their people from all of these problems aka WagTheDog.
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there are stories out there that the steam released by a Tonga Volcano might be behind the weather changes this year. NASA LINK
he Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption on Jan. 15, 2022, caused many effects, some illustrated here, that were felt around the world and even into space. Some of those effects, like extreme winds and unusual electric currents were picked up by NASA’s ICON mission and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm. Image not to scale.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith
In the headlines: a vegan internet influencer living in Malaysia dies of malnutrition.
no I don't have a lot of sympathy for her. One wonders how many others she influenced have developed medical problems: being vegan is a cult.
but the main reason I am not sympathetic is that often these types are rich upper middle class educated women who are hoity toity to the rest of us (both deplorables and poor people).
There are several reports out there about children in the affluent west suffering malnutrition and even dying because their crazy moms didn't feed them corectly
She was an influencer and like other cult leaders this lady got lots of positive feedback on how wonderful she was, never mind that she was pushing bad advice.
Ironically a lot of so called medical sites are very sympathetic to those vegan idiots and their diet. (racism? Because most seem to be upper class elite women who are intelligent, and so the docs identify with their culture).
And of course the green idiots running the world are pushing vegetarian diets so often cite their health benefits: Ignoring that yes they don't get a lot of diabetes or obesity but ignore that malnutrition makes you vulnerable to infectious disease, osteoporosis, anemia and poor wound healing.
I did treat malnourished people when I was in training and during my time in practice.
Many of these people were usually poor from the slums or in small towns who couldn't afford meat and ate lots of bread but few veggies or fruit and not a lot of meat/milk/eggs due to poverty, (and the difficulty in buying food in poor areas aka food deserts...).
Things have now improved since I was in medical school: food stamps and the WIC program have made these problems less acute.
I worked mainly with the rural poor and on the Res, ... The IHS has outreach to our babies, our elders and our diabetics. For example, the WIC program helped stop malnutriton in babies (and we stressed breast feeding).
The federal government PHS runs these hospitals, but now thanks to casinos, the tribes are taking them over... but often the staff are the same: people trained in preventive medicine and tribal customs...there is Indian preference in hiring and that helps too.
Yes, racism is real...Yes but not race per se but ignorance or disdain by docs for people who don't think and act like upper class white elites. And the reverse is also true: patients have more trust in someone from the same background.
However, most of my expertise in nutrition was when I worked in Africa.
We had a lot of kwashiorkor and marasmus among babies when I worked in Africa.
Marasmus was usually babies whose moms got pregnant too soon and weaned their babies early. Since the babies couldn't eat/digest adult food, they ended up thin.
But Kwashiorkor was in older toddlers who had been weaned: Meaning they now had no breast milk and the adult diet lacked protein.
We had a nutrition village to educate moms into learning to use a proper diet; and we taught how to use cheap high protein foods and ways to care for chickens to get more eggs to add to their baby's diet.
So how do you do outreach to traditional communities to improve health and nutrition?
Andrew Webwafa has a lot of videos up on youtube about his outreach clinics, including nutritional ones, if you want to know how this outreach is done.
Thirty years ago. when bioethicist Arthur Caplan moved to Pennsylvania and applied for a driver's license, he asked about adding the organ donation permission to that document, and the clerk warned him: Don't do that: if you do they'll let you die.
already, many in minority communities refuse to sign living wills or no resusitation orders, because they don't trust the medical profession: The Tuskegee experiment is remembered in the Black community, and the collapse of trust in the medical profession after the flawed Covid response will make things worse.
If this is approved, it will mean the Catholic bishops will object to organ donations, and could actually result in fewer organs being donated.
But of course don't expect the MSM to warn you. They will quote elite bioethicists to prove it is okay, and if you oppose it, hey look at all those nice people dying.
It also pushed furthur the idea that people with severe brain damage are better off dead: and this will just push the idea it is not just cruel to keep them alive, but their death will save other, so let's kill them. Could euthanasia be far behind?
No I am not being paranoid, becuase there are reports killing depressed people and then donating their organs is going on.
Actually, when done carefully, the diagnosis of brain death means just that: no brain. No reflexes. No blood circulation to the brain. No brain to control your bodily functions and so the body will die when the machines are removed.
But less strict definitions are fuzzy: one third of people in PVS (aka persistant vegetative state, note that Orwellian term implying they are not humans to be loved but vegetables?
but sometimes lay people think that when doctors say there is no hope so pull the plug, or that a person is a "vegetable" so stop treatment, it is the same as saying they are brain dead. It is not.
and as far back as 1990, there were books written by ethicists saying hey let's limit treatment by law to people with low quality of life
and yes, this is being done in places like the UK where the N.I.C.E. can stop your treatment because of your quality of life
Yes NICE, again a nice fuzzy term to hide what they are doing.
One saw this type of forbidding treatment during covid, of course, where drugs that might or might not work were forbidden to be given and some docs are in danger of losing their license for giving a drug with few side effects to people dying of covid
At the same time, there is a difference between stopping extraordinary treatment or deciding not to get everything done for your disease, and euthanasia. THis also is a fine line: So when we stopped the ventillator on Joy's father who had a massive stroke, we did it after five days when brain swelling had gone down, and he died the next day. IF we had stopped it the first day, it would be considered removing extraordinary treatment, so again it would be permissiable, but the family would have felt Hey maybe he would have recovered so what was the hurry. But once brain edema had gone down, and he could breathe without a respirator, then removing the machines meant he could go to a regular room and have family there.
And Lolo decided against chemotherapy and died in his bed: he was 90, and the chemo probably would not have prolonged his life because of his other medical problems.
Personally I am happy I am retired now and since I live in the Philippines, where sophisticated medical treatment is available, but refusing extraordinary treatment is less controversial and there is respect for the elderly not present in the USA.
I pointed out in an earlier blogpost about
Spaghettification, i.e. pulling a object into spaghetti type strings when it enters a black hole.
so in today's SciDaily news I read a story about scientists learning how to use Ramen spectroscopy to analyze proteins without cooking them accidentally when they do so.
Uh, Ramen Spectroscopy? As in Ramen noodles?
Nope.
it got it's name from C.V. Ramen, the Indian scientist who developed the technique back in the 1920s.
links to what I have been writing about on my other blog:
Myocarditis coverup. Discusses the recent Swiss study that shows a lot of sub clinical asymptomatic evidence of myocarditis from the mRNA vaccine: some of these people will drop dead if their hearts are stressed.
Atypical Dengue. I had complicated (hemorrhagic) Dengue but no muscle pain or headache. I discuss my symptoms and find similar cases in the literature.
Malaria vaccines Do they work? answer the one they have been giving in Africa (experimenting on children to save their lives) works a third of the time. But they are working on newer vaccines based on adenovirus technology that might work better and I note in the future they plan an mRNA vaccine too, but no information on that one.
Polio eradification problems. Lots of technical difficulties, including blowback cases if not everyone has gotten the vaccine.
Lockdown data being debunked. The professors warning about this were of course censored and some lost their jobs. the economic and social problems of lockdown was worse than the disease.
As a doc, I have treated heat stroke several times: Usually in people who were heat stressed and then were exposed to a hotter climate than they were used to. I treated two people in Massachusetts in May when hot weather hit: One was an elderly lady brought in because she was confused, but the other was a young man out jogging who came in convulsing... I don't know if he made it. And another case was when our Pennsylvania NatGuard unit was doing our two week training in southern Virginia: It was 104 and one guy from the mountain area of Pennsylvania came in confused.
A lot of us are laughing at Europeans saying you will die if it goes over 90. Heck, they never lived in Texas. However, the heat is the reason the French take the month of August off, and because they don't use airconditioners, they have a lot of people dying of the heat.
Here in the Philippines, we are used to heat in the 90s, but yes it was pretty hot last week until the typhoon moved nearby and gave us four days of heavy rain. The worst time is before the Monsoon hits in June: once the monsoon comes in the late afternoon we have thunderstorms that cool things off.
But then there is heat exhaustion.
In heat stroke, your body temperature regulation stops working, you stop sweating, and your body temperature soars (105 is not unusual).
In heat exhaustion often you see dizzyness, fatigue, confusion etc. and often people collapse: their blood pressure goes up and they have a stoke or it goes down and they have a heart attack. And to make things worse, diarrhea is common in the heat: from food poisoning or just viruses that go around. This can kill babies.
When our NatGuard unit did our two weeks in the Idaho desert, I would go around making sure people drank water: a pint an hour at least. So we had few problems.
Here, of course, the problem is partly working in the hot sun, both farmers and those repairing the road nearby (we made sure they had ice for their water) or working construction.
but the main problem is those inside small homes in urban areas, which tend to be hotter. Many have fans, but not everyone. And some have to get water from the common pump so may not drink enough. And many elders have high blood pressure which can go up from the heat.
As for children: Here in our rural area, usually moms breast feed, but older infants and moms who work and formula feed the kids, it means they are in danger not just from heat but from unclean bottles and diarrhea.
Ranker has the story of how that scene was filmed: on the first day, they filmed an actual parade with their inserted float. Then the second day they refilmed it with lots and lots of extras.
And others were just ordinary folk who danced:
Construction workers and window washers can be spotted jamming out to Matthew Broderick's lip-synced rendition of "Twist and Shout." These were not choreographed dancers or extras hired to play a part - instead, they were just people going about their everyday jobs.
and in the next blogpost he comments on hearing music while visiting Santiago de Compostela
its multiplicity of multi-directional pipes filled the vast building with glorious sounds, I was reminded of Thomas Carlyle who wrote:
"Listen, and for organ music thou wilt ever, as of old, hear the Morning Stars sing together."
that part about the morning stars singing together is from Job chapter38.
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone— while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
#EgayPH has developed into the super typhoon category on Tuesday morning with four areas now under Tropical Cyclone Wind Signal No. 3, state meteorologists said. | @JEMendozaINQhttps://t.co/G2VIg8yhzx
