Language matters

I'm a STEM/Medical nerd so tend to be concrete in my thinking, but once in while I check out the history of where a word came from and how it changed in defintion.

Usually this happens slowly, and culture evolves, but sometimes it is a deliberate thing imposed from above for ideological reasons. Mr. Orwell call your office.

This video is about reality vs newspeak. Most of it, but not all of it, is about the transgender movement insisting we distort language from reality so we don't hurt someone's feelings: but as Peterson predicted long ago, it has morphed from being polite to government coercion.

But they also discuss the distortion of language as part of a larger problem.

I worry. You see, as a doc who worked with the mentally retarded (which was what those with congenital mental defects were once called) I can only say that the argument of redefining words for ideological reasons rather than using words as they are traditionally used by ordinary folk is something that Orwell first described, and is in full swing in today's world and it has horrific implications if not recognized.

My interest in this is because in the modern western world, ethicists are busy redefining who is human: and the reason is to justify that we could ethically kill them, or in more mainstream ethics, why we should just deny them medical treatment when they get sick.

Here is another Peterson interview.

This is about the intellectual/Marxist/Fabian roots of eugenics.

...

This didn't start with Biden, covid, or even the new century: It was being written in medical ethics journals since at least the 1980s... and indeed, it has roots in the Eugenics movment of the early 1900s,

The agenda has been around for awhile..Here is the blurb for Callahan's book Setting Limits, second edition, published in 1995....

SETTING LIMITS Medical Goals in an Aging Society with "A Response to My Critics" Daniel Callahan 

A provocative call to rethink America's values in health care. Reviews "Callahan addresses the problems of aging in a clear, comprehensive, sensitive, and compassionate manner. This is a pivotal work that poses hard questions and proposes provocative answers. Setting Limits promises to be the benchmark for future moral, medical and policy discussions of aging."—New York Times Book Review.

 Italics mine. the hard decisions are, of course, deciding to kill Grandmom or your Down's syndrome child to save the government money, although to defend Callahan, he actually opposed direct killing, and only says don't treat them and let them die naturally.

Sort of like how Obama said Maybe You're "Better Off" Taking Painkillers And Forgoing Surgery

Nat Hentoff, a First Amendment activist, once called these bioethicsts "apologists for death", and one reason he opposed Hillary's health care bill was that the ethicists behind the bill were of this ilk: and he insisted that he saw no place in the constitution that said the government could decide your medical care.

well, I don't know how it is in the USA right now, but in the UK, this vision is implemented by an institution that has the Orwellian name "N.I.C.E."...

NICE website here.PDF of their future plans.,,

,,Provide dynamic, living guideline recommendations that are useful, useable and rapidly updated. They’ll incorporate the latest evidence and newly recommended technologies to maximise uptake and access for patients.

Drive the implementation of our guidance, forming key strategic partnerships to make sure it’s used. We’ll make sure it delivers improvements and contributes to reducing inequalities, with measures to routinely track adoption.

italics mine. 

Sounds nice, until you realize tha that part about "drive the implentation of our guidelines" means to force patients and hospitals and docs to go along with their decisions. 

and the guidelines include the notorious QALY idea: 

In other words, quality-adjusted life year measures how many additional months or years of life of a reasonable quality a patient or person may gain due to treatment. The QALY metric is essential in health economics, medical costs calculations, program evaluations, and insurance coverage determinations..

again, italics mine. 

This 2008 essay from Lifesite discusses how CS Lewis fortold this type of thinking and accurately predicted what we are seeing in pushing the covid epidemic precautions/vaccines to the max, so that even a pro vaxxer like myself is wondering if the conspiracy theorists are right, and this is about government power and control, not public health.

In that novel, That Hideous Strength, the ironically acronymed N.I.C.E. takes over Britain and attempts to create an anti-human totalitarianism in which human rights are abolished and people are used as disposable tools in medical and social experiments. The guiding principles of Lewis’ N.I.C.E. are immediately familiar to people on the pro-life side of our current Culture Wars: a mechanistic and ultra-utilitarian, anti-life philosophy that regards human beings as merely a disposable means to an end.

In today’s Britain, these same nihilistic philosophies are being adopted by the medical establishment and government, with effective abortion-on-demand and increasing calls for legalized euthanasia.

Over sixty years after Lewis warned what might be the outcome of an overweening anti-Christian materialist philosophy, combined with the union of state, industry, and academia, and the manipulation of the mass media, reality is coming increasingly to resemble fiction.

 And it seems beyond a coincidental irony that a real-life, government-funded organization that bases its decisions on the same utilitarian principles, could be known by the same acronym: N.I.C.E.

the NICE website: 

Set up by the Labour government in 1999, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (N.I.C.E.) produces “guidance” for the NHS on what drugs and treatments should be provided by Britain’s government-funded health system.

From the extraction of wisdom teeth, to the funding of Alzheimer’s drugs, to the provision or withdrawal of nutrition and hydration to disabled patients, N.I.C.E. lays down what will and will not be paid for by Britain’s National Health Service.

italics mine. 

as lifesite predicted:

Classical utilitarianism proposes that medical treatment ought to produce “the greatest good for the greatest number,” a formula that has been translated by bioethicists into the three euphemistic principles of “justice”, “beneficence”, and “autonomy”. As they are interpreted by bioethics committees, these new principles are at odds with the classical, Natural Law, or Christian-based medical ethics that start with the principle, “do no harm” to an individual patient. The new utilitarian principles, in the matter of a nationalized health system where private medical care is largely unavailable, require that some are judged worthy of treatment and others not, in order to benefit the greatest number possible.

The N.I.C.E. describes its template of criteria as being based on “efficacy and cost effectiveness,” in which a key formula is the “quality adjusted life year” (QALY). 

The QALY “takes into consideration the quality of life of the patient during any additional time for which their life will be prolonged”. The clinical and cost effectiveness of the treatment is then used as the basis for a recommendation as to whether or not the treatment should be provided.

To make things worse, the experts for at least 50 years have been hinting that maybe it's okay to do these things because some people lack the criteria for "personhood": by redefining "Personhood" in a way that the mentally ill, mentally damaged, senile and infants are excluded.

I first discovered this in the mid 1980s when I was recovering from surgery and was reading the latest blurb in the NEJM, where these ideas were being discussed. 

I wrote the philopsopher who wrote the book review, asking if this was true, and if this was true, could that mean we could use these "non persons" for organ donations etc? He kindly answered me, saying that in today's philosophical community, not only is there no good philosophical argument that the the old, very young, mentally damaged etc. should be considered full humans with full human rights, but there was no way to argue why any human has any of these rights.

SecularProlife Website has recently published an article about these problem.

No, God is not allowed in these arguments: not only the God of religion, but the creator of the enlightenment. And this is a revolutionary idea.

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In psychology, we had a rule: The cabdriver rule. Often you would get involved into the story that the patient would tell you, but we were told to stand back and ask yourself: What would the average cabdriver think of this? And if he said ït was crazy, then maybe your patient had a psychiatric problem.

We now have a world where the crazies are silenceing those who object to the craziest behavior, while one only has to read articles from Canada to see that this isn't about a trouble teenage girl having a mastectomy, but the next step is killing the unteremensch and depressed.

and yes, thanks to the devout Catholic Joe Biden (/s), doctors in the USA might not be able to opt out of doing procedures that they feel are immoral.

Alas, one suspects few doctors, who for the last 30 years have been essentially pressured into being employees in the wellness industry, will object to this (and heaven knows, most medical associations won't object, because they are run by left wing activists because most of us are too busy caring for patients to run for these administration type offices).

but there are several ways to fight this ruling; 

One is to cite the Civil Rights law of 1964 (section 7) and citing religious objections to doing something, so you can't be fired.

This worked for me in the 1960s when I refused to do abortions, 

The second way is an old fashioned strike. 

One of my friends related that the Muslim OB/Gyn doctors who were told to do abortions refused to do so, because most of them were done for convenience, not for disabled infants or the mother's health (which are allowed by some Musilm ethicists). The university hospital threatened to fire anyone who refused to do the abortions, (which would have meant not just joblessness but losing their American work visa). So how did these Muslim doctors respond? The Muslim residents stood together and said: Fire one of us, and ALL of us will quit...not just all those in OB/Gyn but in other specialties.

the hospital backed down.

to complicate matters, many hospitals are Catholic or merged with Catholic hospitals agreeing to follow Catholic ethics. Could these hospitals break their contracts? Or would the bishops and the Catholic health association merely say rather than do immoral surgery or killing we will shut them down?

One doubts it, even though ths would stop the government power grab, too many will just submit, and even quote the now anti life Pontifical academy at the Vatican pronouncements (not by the Pope, of course. He says A but lets his minions push B) 

With this type of confusion coming out of the Vatican, dare one expect the American bishops have the backbone to object? One wonders. Alas, with all the sins of overlooking sexual scandal, the dirty little secret is that it is easly to destroy someone threatening you by finding someone to discover he or she was molested 40 years ago, but just happened to remember it now.

Sigh.

This is too long I know: But few read my blog anyway.

Dean Koontz, call your office.

peace deal hated by twittersphere

Elon Musk is not only making the ten percent of people who have nothing better to do than tweet (and the 30 percent of bots there) hyperventillate because he now says he will take it over.

But on top of this he has a peace plan for the Ukraine that makes sense.

LINK2

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

Ukraine-Russia Peace: - Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people. - Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake). - Water supply to Crimea assured. - Ukraine remains neutral.

of course, the Ukraine doesn't like it, but it makes sense. And the Ukraine should remember that the west hesitated in sending them weapons in the very early days of the war, partly from fear of Russia but mainly because the experts figured that the Ukraine would fall to the experienced Russian army withing a week.

But the Ukrainian response stopped the Russians to every expert's astonisment, so the west (or part of the west ) decided maybe they should help.

However, in the earliest days of the war, the Ukrainians got help from one ally that let them reestablish much needed communications: Elon Musk repositioned his Starlink satellites and sent in receivers.

So maybe it's time to pay attention to the nerdy guy who helped you.

Besides, if you settle quickly maybe they will be able to send grain to feed the Middle East (which might stop more unrest there), allow the Germans to stay warm this winter, and get us cheap fertilizer.

Greatest beer run (bring the guys a Pabst beer)

 

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Wikipedia link. 

an everyman decides to cheer up his buddies fighting in VietNam by taking them some local beer (Pabst). Zach Efron is believable in playing the good old boy, and Russell Crowe, as a cynical but unbiased reporter, steals every scene he is in.

 

 I must confess that one reason I watched this film is that it got bad reviews from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but the viewers gave it a 90 percent.

This was a signal that the film was not PC, probably because it didn't denigrate the US soldier. It portrayed the ordinary Yank as decent but depressed at the craziness of the war. People forget that it was the ones they now call "deplorable" who fought the war, and a lot of the bitterness against the elite can be traced to this polarization over Vietnam, where the elite left saw every flaw in the Americans but ignored the the terrible atrocities of the Vietcong which hinted at the genocides and ethnic cleansing that happened after they took over.

In the film, our good old boy discovers that war is hell:

But it also shows the importance of community and friendship in the working class neighborhoods who sent many of their sons to fight the war.

 The film suceeds because it doesn't preach a lot of nonsense, but just shows how he learned this lesson. And a reminder to the cheerleaders of war: even just wars are hell.

I give it a 3 out of 4 stars.

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this is the short film that inspired the movie:

liberal catholics lament dead animals (no sorrow for people of course)

 I posted about the Catholic bishops here telling catholics not to invest in fossil fuel companies (which means of course that China will gladly invest and steal these resources, while the average person will have to cope with higher prices to travel to work, cook with LPG, and we farmers will face higher prices for diesel to run out farm equipment and irrigation pumps).

Sheesh.

But hey, the elites who run the church are now telling us the importance of caring for our dogs and cats.

From UCNA news:

Filipino Catholics lobby for animal rights Thousands of animal lovers flock to churches seeking blessings for their pets ahead of feast day of Saint Francis

Pet lovers pose with their pets in Immaculate Conception parish in Jalaan, Misamis Oriental province during a rally for animal rights. (Photo supplied)

,,,,Yup. White ladies of PETA are here lamenting the animals killed in the typhoon.

Never mind the humans who died, or will develop disease, or will become malnourished because the rice crop was destroyed by the same typhoon.

true, some of the dogs were chained up: but what is not mentioned is that maybe the family had to go to a shelter and couldn't take them along. And stray dogs are a major rabies problem.

here in the country, we do see the middle class with their foo foo dogs (some even put diapers on them so they can carry them in the mall). But the majority of dogs are middle sized mutt, and no, they are not treated as part of the family but kept for protection: on a leash or in a dog cage during the day and allowed out at night to bite intruders. My daughter in law was astounded that I talk to the dogs and give them affection. Usually dogs are ignored: fed and given a place to stay but not much more.

But as affluence spreads, so does the love of dogs (one suspects the dogs and cats are replacing the children they are not letting be born).

So the person projects full humanity on the pets.

“We’re here not only for the blessing of pets but also for pet baptismal day. Yes, we want our pets to be baptized even by a mere ceremony to mark their identity as Catholic pets,” dog lover Carol Sebastian told UCA News. Sebastian and fellow pet lovers had submitted a proposal to their parish priest to allow them to celebrate a “pet wedding” wherein partner dogs and cats may be blessed by a clergyman to simulate the sacrament of marriage.

at least the bishops spokesman reminded them the sacraments were for humans.

The Pope is pointing to St Francis for this love of animals and the environment.

Silly me. I don't remember him pushing environmentalism over poor people. But never mind.  

This is just one more way the church is busy pushing PC stuff instead of preaching Jesus and holiness.

as for stray dogs: The number of street dogs skyroeketed after covid hit, and it would break your heart to see them. But with rabies being a threat, no one will adopt them.

As for cats: All the cats in the area (both feral and our house cats) disappeared last January, probably from an infectious disease, and they are just starting to come back.

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Related item: First Things article on saving the forests in Palawan.

Illegal logging is a big problem here: it survives due to corruption. Outsiders come in, bribe the local officials to look the other way, and hire locals to do the work.

And local poor people go along with it because they have families to feed. 

Alas, the destruction of forests are one reason we have landslides.

However, the article goes on to say how local people in the Philippines and locals in West Virginia are opposing logging/strip mines/resorts.

Fine. But you know, when I worked in Appalachia (in Pennsylvania) the result of closing the coal mines was not pristine nature, but depopulation as people had to move elsewhere to find jobs.

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update:

quick what is missing from this video pushing the new synodality craze in the Francis church?

   

Full of vague psychobabble? Check.

Young healthy people having fun walking around? Check?

Jesus? No mention of him.

Living a moral life? Nope.

Responsibility? Nope.

Family life? No mention here.

God being a solace in suffering? What suffering? We are a happy happy church. Get with the action and sing.

sorry: I have spent my life working with the poor and sick. And it is going to Jesus in prayer that gives us the strength to be his hands in this world.

And just ignore the people left without a house or income aftere the typhoon, or the street kids in Manila who live and eat worse than your pampered pooch of course.

 

artist: Joey Velasco

headsup father Z

cleaning up

 we are still busy with the clean up.

Joy went with the rice delivery to Manila to see if one of the properties we own there and rent out was damaged. This is the house where Kuya lived when he went to college, and the front part has been renovated to make it a commercial office.

presumably the streets are now open.

We still have a lot of a mess in our private gardens: Other priorities. The water supply to the house, the rice crop may be salvagable and the rice storage bodega is getting a new roof. ManBUlletin has a report here. it's not just the rice destroyed, but the buildings and equipment on the farms. A couple years ago, we lost all the buildings of our chicken farm during a typhoon. Luckily we had just "harvested"the chickens so we didn't have to bury 1000 dead chickens, but we never did rebuild: instead we converted the area for drying and storing rice,

I am exhausted: I suspect it is from the prolonged exposure to the heat when we had limited electricity. There has been some rain since then also, and the next worry is a rise of dengue fever due to all the puddles etc where mosquitoes breed.

It's been raining on and off, with overcast skies for the last two days, but no major problem...There is another low pressure area out there, but will probably miss us.

Yay! electricity and water back on.

 three cheers to our electric company workers; the electricity came back on yesterday at 5 pm. 

The Philippines may not be as efficient at the USA, but our hard workers do get things done in times of emergencies. And in times of emergency, everyone helps each other.

Since we have full electricity, it means I can run the air conditioner in my bedroom at night.

You see, I have asthma, and the aircon has a hepa filter that gets rid of allergens and keeps the humidity down to stop mold growth... I also have a regular air filter for cooler days that uses less electricity. Without them, it means getting up at night to use an inhaler... and I am feeling better: I was feeling exhausted and had no energy on and off all week. It's only in the low 90s, but the humidity is high so it feels worse.

More good news: The water is running....the city water is back on and we have fixed our deep well pump, so we have water. Yay! I can finally take a warm shower!

We had been borrowing water from our neighbor who had a pump that was working, and it means no hauling buckets of water to the bathroom to flush the toilet or to wash.

The staff is delivering rice to Manila today: a few days late due to the roads not being passable. (there is a major expressway a couple miles away, but to get there you travel along smaller roads)...

And the staff continues to pack rice for another delivery, probably tomorrow.

this video is of the nearby roads.

....

 we now are hearing some traffic on the street, meaning things are starting to move (the main highway through town is one way, and the bypass goes around our business compound. Usually there are trucks going by carrying rice, food, or construction supplies.

Family news: Bye Bye Koi

The typhoon has left a lot of damage, and everyone is busy cleaning up. 

this video show our area of town:

We are still on generator, and have limited water from our deep well: for some reason the pump isn't working well (maybe not enough current from the small generator). Our large generator was damaged and needs a new radiator, which may take time to fix, so we are on my small backup generator.

the small generator is for the refrigerator, fans, fish pump, and small appliances: and I can run either the water pump (which we got fixed on Tuesday) or my airconditioner, but not both.

Choices, choices.

But alas, since we run it on and off (about 8 hours a day) it was not enough to keep our poor fish alive: (clarification: You need to keep the water oxygenated with a pump)...We lost a couple of talapia and our last two koi. Sigh.

I gave them to the staff to bury, but since they were freshly dead, I suspect they will eat them. Why waste good food.

 Electricity is being slowly restored to our town...but not our place yet.

Lots of downed wires: some from trees blown down but also because the newer concrete electric poles broke from the winds or pulled over when the wires were hit with falling trees etc. 

The original wood polls were replaced with concrete poles, installed for the high voltage electric cables that are gradually replacing the tangled mess of smaller electric wires...presumably the concrete poles lifted the cables high enough not to be snagged by passing rice trucks, something that which used to happen once or twice a year on the road that goes by our house.

At least the roads are opening up. 

We had to cancel a scheduled rice delivery to Manila earlier in the week due to blocked roads. I don't know when it will be rescheduled: Joy is busy packing rice into small packages for her delivery. She is using some of the rice stored here, since she still can't get to her farm and office in Bulacan. I haven't heard if that rice was spoiled or if that crop was destroyed like it was here. (Our winds were stronger: As I mentioned in a previous blogpost, the eye went right over our town so we got hit with the strongest winds.) But of course part of the problam causing damage is the flooding.

We finally can get to the farm with a motorcycle but not a truck. The roof of the bodega on our farm that stores rice blew off and so the men are busy drying the rice on the higher shelves that got wet from the rain. 

The bad news is that much of this summer's rice crop in our area was flattened by the winds. Luckily part of our rice crop was in low lying land, the nearby trees landed on the road instead of the field, and most of the crop was planted later than normal, so the rice plants are still flexible and will recover. Alas, the almost ripe rice is probably ruined.

....

The internet is back. 

Through every thing, the cellphones were available to communicate. The main problem, of course, being that cellphones have to be charged: So our neighbors, hearing our generator, brought their cellphones to be charged. 

And our neighbor, who had water from a handpump, did give us water to drink and wash with until our pump was fixed.

We now have water, but limited amount. No shower: You wash with a tabo (dipper) and a bucket. Ditto for toilet.

The clothes washing has to be done by hand, so probably we will do only what is absolutely necessary until the current is restored, since we are rationing our electricity to what is absolutly necessary.

where did all the roofs go?

 The typhoon came thru here Sunday night: as a signal five,  but it weakened when it entered central Luzon so maybe it was only a signal four when it hit us.

My room is the one best protected (window faces the center of the compound, and the other window has a nearby wall) so we all were in my bedroom hunkered down: including five dogs...

the typhoon, which came up suddently and got strong quickly, changed again: from signal 5 to signal 4, and started traveling faster than predicted: It was supposed to be at the peak at midnight, but the eye passed over us at 10 pm, and the winds had pretty well stopped by 4 am.

The bad news is that it caused major damage. Long report from the Inquirer here.

 there was a landslide nearby that buried and killed some people.

And many local people lost their roof, including our maid and the house owned by Joy's pastor. Alas, in shoddy houses, if the roof goes, the entire house goes, and of course many of the houses were flooded.

Sigh.

No electricity, and maybe none for another week. City water seems to be on, but our internet was off because no electricity for the office modem, and Joy's internet is completely out.

Our generator needed fixing, so for two days we used my backup generator, which is too small for the office but keeps us in fans and will run the refrigerator and even my airconditioner weakly if we don't add any other appliances. But now our large generator is fixed, so that is a help.

The neighbors are here getting their cellphone charged. People need cellphones to keep in touch with family etc.

I went out for the first time today. The center square plaza lost their large lovely tree, which fell across some of the food kiosk, but the ferris wheel looks intact.

our roof was damaged, and all of our banana trees were destroyed, and the fruit trees in our garden lost limbs.

But the bad news is that the winds flattened the almost rice rice crop, and even our rice storage bodega lost it's roof.

since the business lady that Kuya sold our last crop to has not paid him yet, we are already short money, and now might face a major loss in the summer crop. Not just us, of course, but all the rice and vegetable farmers in the area.

Sigh.

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update: Our rice delivery couldn't get to Manila yesterday due to debris/trees blocking roads but went today.

Lots of locals have vlog with local update

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Hissing cockroach robot to the rescue.

Nimble cyborg cockroaches may join rescue team at disaster sites

 

another day, another typhoon

 LINK

Right now, it is cloudy and a mild drizzle, but we are signal three, meaning things could get worse by tonight.

I hope the roof doesn't blow off again, and I hope it doesn't flatten the almost ripe rice crop.

And I hope there will be no major flooding.

One of the joys of living in the Philippines: we get typhoons but our area hasn't been hit badly this year, but this one looks like it will go right over us.

I will update later, but if things go bad usually we lose the internet (but still have cellphone connection and radio for news).

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3 pm no wind but heavy rains.

Everyone is getting candles and food, and the ATM will only dispense small 100 peso bills, meaning that it's almost empty.

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Cardinal Zen: FIghting for human rights in Hong Kong

 Cardinal Zen helped those demonstrating in Hong Kong against the Chinese takeover, and now he is being arrested for defending their civil rights.

AlJezeera has a long article with the background of the story.

“The Chinese government wants to cut off all forms of organizing and solidarity that run outside of the Communist Party’s control in Hong Kong,” William Nee, research and advocacy coordinator at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said in an emailed response to questions. “The fact that Cardinal Zen is compassionate, caring, and well-respected in Hong Kong actually makes him a threat to the ruling authorities.”

the pesky Cajun reporter at EWTN discusses the response (actually lack of response) to this human rights atrocity.

............ 

One hopes that President Biden and other political leaders will pressure China...

 The Pope is ignoring the story. Last year, when Cardinal Zen tried to deliver a letter to the Vatican about the problem of the church's agreement with China, the Pope refused to see him. And now it seems the pope seems to defending China's actions.

again from AlJ:

The Catholic Church has been criticised for failing to take a firmer stand over Zen’s arrest and trial. 

 After he was charged on May 24, pictured walking into court leaning heavily on a stick, the church released a short statement noting that he had pleaded not guilty and that it would “closely monitor” events. “Cardinal Zen is always in our prayers and we invite all to pray for the Church,” it concluded.

On Thursday, when the pope was asked about religious freedom in China and Zen’s looming trial, he said that while it was “not easy to understand the Chinese mentality”, it had to be “respected”, according to a report in Catholic News.

 LOL...

 

Three thousand years of longing

 A black Genie?

Well, it worked for Will Smith. But a genie played by the usually dour Isdris Elba? 

But how about a grownup story about a nerdish professor of mythology who accidentally releases a genie? Tilda Swinton plays the part perfectly: Indeed the main reason I decided to watch the film was her tendency to play off beat parts.

After accidentally releasing the genie, they argue about wishes: She points out that usually wishes granted easily tend to go bad, and he answers her by telling her about previous owners of his wishes (whose wishes do seem to give happiness before ending in tragedy). 

I am not sure why I liked the film. Maybe because the plot was different: Although there was a genie, it wasn't a Marvel or Disney universe genie, nor a Hallmark type love story...and the stories told by the genie were.... different, albeit a bit depressing because ultimately the genie, who sought to give them wishes to make them happy, saw that his powers were futile to give them the happiness they wanted, and what he wanted (if he grants 3 wishes successfully, he gets his freedom).

The cinematography was beautiful, and although the lady professor was tart and intellectual, you end up liking and understanding her by the end of the film.

I usually post a trailer at this point, but both trailers on line miss the essence of the film's story, which is about longing, not special effects.

The theme song however does give you a hint of the melancholy searching for love that is the theme behind the film.

I give this a four out of four stars.

The Epidemic is over, sort of

 Joe Biden in at least two interviews claimed the epidemic of covid is over (a milder form is now endemic: sort of as covid morphed from killer flu that needed intervention to control the spread to an ordinary cold that will be with us forever).

....

Dr. C discusses, and one does hope that youtube won't censor him for quoting what any doctor knows about the vaccines: They did work, and saved lives. 

but now that the pandemic is over, why the push on vaccinating low risk folk including children?

The newer varients don't kill except for a few high risk folk, and the shots don't give good protection. 

but he points out that there is now a covalent vaccine that gives immunity against the newer strains: The problem is the lack of  data in humans, including safety data (the experts assume the side effects are similar to the original vaccine). Eight mice confirm it works.

One hopes that Dr C doesn't get banned from Youtube for saying such things (he is, like myself, pro vaccine, but in publich health you have to know about side effects and efficiency of vaccines, and the way you do this is open discussion, not censoring anyone who dares to question the authorities).

theTablet has an article on how government officials pressured media and social networks like you tube etc. to ban publicizing the Great Barrington Declaration, that questioned the extensive use of the vaccines on low risk groups and the high cost of the extreme lockdowns.

To my shame, liberal media websites like the UKGuardian, which are usually sceptical of power pushes from governments and profit making ventures of Big Pharma, added their voice to silence the discussion. 

the problem is made worse because private companies can censor stories and give their opinion, but when the government is behind this, it is against the first amendment.

Ironically, the way most ordinary folk found out the details of what was going on was by listening to Joe Rogan who let one of the docs behind this give his side of the story for two hours, transcript here.

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The big danger here is Dengue fever, not just here in the Philippines but also in other countries. LINK

TimesOfIndia discusses the problems of using a vaccine to stop Dengue: what kills you is the reaction to the disease, which causes the hemorrhagic type of sickness.

The Philippines was pressured into giving the vaccine to kids a couple years ago but improper screening led to some deaths, 

Background: a few docs pointed out that giving it to kids who had not had dengue in the past could cause the hemorrhagic type complication, and there was a natural suspicions that Filipino kids were being used as guinea pigs, (and of course locals wondered if maybe small gifts encouraged approval of giving out the vaccine),

ScientificAmerican article on the dengue debacle.

Full medical details about dengue from a 2018 article in Lancet.

One side effect:  epidemics of other diseases such as measles because parents refused any vaccine for their kids.

another side effect: The DOH refused to approve of the Pfizer vaccine for covid that the US planned to send to the Philippines in January 2021, so we didn't start vaccinating until later in the year.

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And guess what? Ebola is breaking out in Uganda. Luckily they have a vaccine for this now, so it will probably be stopped before it kills a lot of folks. The problem: This is not the strain that the vaccine stopped in DRC, it is a strain from Sudan, so maybe the vaccine won't work as well as hoped.

sigh.

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Let's discuss behavior

actually let's not discuss behavior because it means you will be censored as a bigot.

So the full post was moved to my medical blog, where behaviors are part of the reason disease spreads. (what, you stopped wearing a mask? How dare you).

LINK

the US Navy has implemented a "don't ask don't tell" program for sailors, and pushing education on those with old fashioned ideas.

What is not discussed: The behavior.....

without discussing how this training goes against religious beliefs that some behavior is wrong, (italics mine) the end result  might mean a lot of the best and brightest will either leave or will tell their kids not to join the service. 

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Similarly, in this monkeypox in an infant report leaves out the question: Why is a small baby sleeping in the same bed as two caregivers, one of whom had done high risk behavior and started having symptoms three weeks before the child's rash started ? ......

and then there is racism.

given that most news reports imply monkey pox was a white middle aged MSM disease, even I was aghast that in recent weeks that there had been an increase in the numbers of people who were minority background.

NBC report about this, and the barriers to minority men who suspect they have the disease: not just the stigma against MSM, but the bureaucratic problems that stopped people from getting tested and treated properly, including the slowness in contacting possible contacts to the gentleman who first came down with symptoms, and the obstacles to getting the vaccine.....

And the problems of rural and inner city health outreach is not just about the black community, but about other minorities, including working class whites.