Israeli settlements on stolen land

Close to half of Israeli settlement land is on private palestinian land, and Israel won't do anything to help the palestinian owners get their land back.

Of course that's par for the course. Governments protect their favored citizens and they will ALWAYS steal anything they can from anyone who is helpless and has no government to protect him. The United States stole Philippine sovereignty from Filipinos, because there was no other government that would stop them at the time. That's what governments do. The United States is stealing huge tracts of Iraq right now to build tens of military bases, almost all of which, no doubt, will become permanent U.S territory, for use as torture chambers just as stolen Guantanamo is now.

Apparently, the international community is not yet strong enough to protect the rights of non-citizens (the palestinians are a people with no country since they're not citizens of israel and they don't have their own country either). Maybe in another hundred years. But maybe not.

In a visit to the Middle East former president Bush asks:

How come everybody wants to come to the United States if the United States is so bad?

And elsewhere in the article:

Another hostile audience member, a college student in Abu Dhabi, told Bush that U.S. wars were aimed at opening markets for American companies. He said globalization was contrived for America's benefit at the expense of the rest of the world. Bush was having none of it.

"I think that's weird and it's nuts," Bush said. "To suggest that everything we do is because we're hungry for money, I think that's crazy. I think you need to go back to school."

The two quotes are related though, although of course an American wouldn't see the point. As a practical matter, yes, the U.S. does what it does in the world because it wants to protect and increase the incomes of U.S. companies. Free trade doesn't make any headway in the U.S. when big corn interests are concerned, but the U.S. will coerce third world countries to open their markets so that the U.S. can sell all manner of goods and services to those countries. There is nothing inherently wrong with that sort of policy. It's what governments do. The wrong there, the reason why the world looks down on U.S. policy, is that it enforces those policies with force. It bribes foreign governments to get on the bandwagon and pass legislation protecting U.S. interests (lately, primarily information technology and intellectual property rights), it strongarms the weak. It is also very successful at all of this. Mr Bush, THAT'S why everybody wants to go to the United States. It's better to be the oppressor than the oppressed. The oppressor can earn many times what the oppressed can earn and there's less chance of being killed and tortured if one is an American citizen. Sure, it's still possible (taser, taser, taser, taser deaths), but it happens much less often than out here in the real world.

Those people who want to go to the United States? They go because the good life is purchased at the cost of oppressing the rest of the world. A generalized pride in one's sons is a good thing, certainly. But mistakes should be corrected gently, and mistakes (or purposeful evil) that kills people (never mind the dead Iraqi and Afghan civilians Mr Bush, just look at those dead american kids) should be corrected vigorously. If you won't correct your son when he's killing your own citizens, do you wonder why he turned out as he did?

Mumpsimus: Rules for writing

Mumpsimus' rules for writing are hilarious

When specifying particular cities in fiction, do not use cities that have been specified in poems. Poems have so few things left of their own anymore that we should let them have their own cities.

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Reddit Reduced

From reading slashdot, reddit, digg and others (on bloglines, all of those links are sufficiently famous, they don't need the infinitesimal pagerank boost I could give them by linking to them), I see a lot of interesting links all the time. I email some of those to friends, I always forget one or another friend when sending links around. Sometimes I make up for it by sending it separately. Usually I don't though.

I think that i'll post summaries of things found on those aggregators here. So this place will become sort of reddit redux, my own favorite links from reddit, digg, etc. I won't post everything I read. but the ones that resonate. Some will be political (George W Bush, that incompetent, destined for ignominy), but hopefully there won't be as much of that. I may post some youtube videos. Actually, I probably will post quite a lot of those. Some of those are damn funny. Sol and I were laughing so hard when we saw the one on the fainting goats.

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Generation Debt and ViolentAcres

There is an article on ABC News about twenty-somethings drowning in debt. I've been watching that happen in the U.S. for nigh on 20 years now. I was in a similar (but much smaller) trap when I was in the U.S. some years.

I link to that because I saw an amusing pair of posts from Violent Acres on a related subject You can learn a lot from a rich girl, on how even little rich girls can get so sunk in debt they don't know what to do, and how she got herself sunk in debt also and how she got out of debt through drastic measures.

I'm sure there are a lot of amusing posts on that blog. I was highly entertained with the first few posts I read. Entertained enough to add her to my RSS feed. Some things are disturbing, like the post on "Retard Genocide". I guess she has "issues" then. But then I'd have found that out if I'd read more of the blog. And she does seem to make a point of being mean occasionally. Not sure what that's about. Occasional meanness makes for some entertainment. Not that much, but to pull in the hoi-polloi and get someone to buy an ad, I'm sure it helps. And some people enjoy letting out a little cattiness. I'm getting ahead of myself there though. I haven't read enough of the blog to know what she's really about. I doubt if I will, either. I don't need to make sense of her wholeness to enjoy the occasional article since she does write amusing posts. And the meanness and occasional stupidity due to "issues", well, I'm very good at ignoring stupidities as long as they don't involve someone impinging on my personal space.

following the trash

I am pleasantly surprised at a system of trash pickup that is current here in Sta Mesa, Manila. My wife and I recently moved here because it would be easier to take care of Timmy, our newborn son and because living with my in-laws would save money all around and would allow me to share an internet connection with everyone. All good things.

Every day the trash truck comes by. Unlike in the U.S., we don't have large lawns nor can we leave our trash in large, sturdy trash bags on the street since:

1. most people won't spend the money for those trash bags since the bags are expensive and most people are poor.



2. dogs, cats and rats will rip through the garbage looking for food.
   
   
3. there are a lot of really poor people who will rip through the garbage looking for food and for recyclables, which they can sell.
   

I'm certainly not against helping the poor people recycle (in fact, read on, this *is* about helping the poor), but in ripping through the trash (usually in grocery plastic bags) the trash is scattered all over the street and can't be put back into any neat state. So the streets would have trash all over the place.

In any case, I'm pleasantly surprised by the system they have here. Maybe it's an informal system that only works with our trash truck, but it's a great system that could be emulated elsewhere. When the trash truck comes by and blows its great airhorn, a nice lady comes over to our gate and calls for the trash. She's not a garbageman at all, just an enterprising nice lady who recycles. She and her husband follow the trash truck and, when it stops, they knock on nearby doors asking for the garbage. We give them the garbage bags and they throw the garbage in the truck. Since they're nice, my mother-in-law also sets aside recyclables and gives those to the lady already separated from the trash, and pretty clean.

I bet all the houses along our row, and all the houses she visits as the truck moves along slowly all separate their garbage. It's a great way to help an enterprising woman who goes out of her way to be nice to homeowners, and who also provides a great service (without her, we would have to take the garbage out to the truck when it arrives, not a big deal for us since we're pretty close to the corner where the truck hangs out, but possibly a problem for those further down the street, especially the old and infirm who stay at home while their children work in the daytime).

It's an efficient way to recycle, it helps a lovely woman who provides a great service to a lot of people, and it doesn't cost anything. It's totally win-win. Well, maybe not. If we had a much better economy, the woman would be doing something else. But while we are trying to dig ourselves out of the hole our corrupt politicians have created for us, it's a great win-win.

I bet that woman would be a great subject for a short news story. When we throw stuff away this Christmas (we have too much stuff, sol and I regularly give away clothes we don't use anymore), I'm going to give her a lot of that stuff. I've given away enough clothes to my friends Sochie and Jack and their kids :-).

More U.S. hypocrisy

After a massacre of women and children all the U.S. can do is call for restraint. It's not enough that they provide Israel with the weapons to kill civilians. It's not enough that they send billions of dollars to Israel to maintain an economy which grinds down Palestinians (and not just the muslims, Christian Palestinians too). They call for restraint when they invade countries willy-nilly, kill civilians left and right, basically follow the israeli model of acting the bully.

They could send aid to the Palestinians, but they won't do it. Instead, when the Palestinians are killed all they can say is that they should practice restraint. That's not mere hypocrisy, that's abetting what Israel does to arab civilians. Without sending any concrete help, the U.S. is asking those being ground down by the Israeli boot to kiss the earth and make their peace with it since they're going to be down there a long time.

I'm waiting for Israeli society to wake up to their own hypocrisy and inhumanity. Seems like it's going to be a long wait though. Israel *should* survive. I love the idea of Israel. It's what they've done to themselves that I lament. They can still dig themselves out of the hole of fear and hate that they've made for themselves. But, again, it's going to be a long wait for that, particularly with the U.S. giving them all the weapons they need to dishonor themselves even more by using them against civilians, women, children, babies.

Baby is home

Sol gave birth on Nov 2, at 6:04AM or so. Timothy Joseph Quimpo is named the same as my brother, but the name really stems from my paternal grandfather Timoteo, my father Jose and our favorite (and only) maternal uncle, Jose.

I was going to post this on MonotremeTech, my other me :-) because it's sort of technical, my first youtube upload. Changed my mind though. This place needs a respite from recriminations against {elided description here} politics, politicians, and the depravity of U.S. foreign policy.

blogger downtime

Alright, I overstretched myself (but i am not an empire). I take some of that back. Despite it being almost halloween (here I would link to my latest post on monotremetech.blogspot.com, but frankly I'm afraid that the Secret Service will get me and waterboard my ass, so, no, feel free to go there, but don't tell anyone I sent you. I'm talking about the post chronologically closest to this one) I don't actually think that he slavers and lusts for blood (that is, he probably isn't the Anti-Christ, but I'm not giving better than 40-60 on that). More likely he's just an incompetent nincompooping bastard who thought everything would go well and that he'd get out of the Iraq war with, oh, less than a hundred Americans dead (he still doesn't care how many non-Americans he kills) and now he has too much pride to accept that, after 650,000 dead in Iraq alone, the war in Iraq might have been a mistake.

Pride comes before the Fall.

I hope this is the last political post here. I've pretty much decided that my family and I are not going to the U.S. while GW Bush is president, and I wouldn't be surprised if we never go to the U.S. again. Much as I love certain individual Americans, I'm just not going to risk getting cavity searched and then taking a free flight to Afghanistan where the CIA will torture my ass merely for posting my thoughts here. My friends and family in the U.S. can visit me out here in the Free World.

Damn, how did that get out there. All I was going to say was that blogger had some scheduled downtime and I had to wait an hour or two before I could post a link to a hilarious hint. I have *got* to care less about what the Americans are doing to the world.

How many deaths

The question is asked, how many deaths will it take before he knows that too many have died.

First a quibble, possibly there is some sense of horror for the deaths that the United States is inflicting (much of it indirect, to be sure, but quite a lot of direct random civilian death too) on Iraqis, Afghans and those Lebanese (children or otherwise) that George W Bush pushed the Israelis (who might not yet have been ready to unleash random death on civilians, although they would have done it on their own eventually) to kill. But that sense of horror, if it's there, doesn't show (at least in that post, maybe it shows in previous posts).

Instead, the cost is measured only in American deaths. That's par for the course, I suppose. I should not be surprised.

But to the answer. Apparently, to George W Bush, Iraq is like a volkswagen beetle. There's always space for one more. It's not like anyone is going to be able to stop the Americans in their march to a million or two million dead. They're the hyperpower of the world. One can hope (although that dwindles steadily now), that, after all that death and blood, the American people will learn something, perhaps that they should stay home and stop killing the rest of us off, defend their country and not destroy countries all over the world. But I'm not too sanguine on that lately. It's that American can-do attitude. Of *course* you can destroy this or that country. The question is, should you do it? How many dead civilians are you willing to spend? (Not your own, foreigners, rag-heads, towel-heads, gooks, whatever). Perhaps the threshold is 100,000. But perhaps not, they're far beyond that now. Perhaps it's half a million. They're a bit beyond that now in Iraq, but they spent several million Vietnamese and Korean civilian dead to pacify those countries (there's nothing quite so peaceful as the dead), so my guess is, when half the Iraqis are dead, possibly George W Bush will be done. I think that won't stop the terrorism though. As a practical matter, he'll have to kill them all. And then not stop, but leave Saudi Arabia, Iran, the West Bank, Syria, Egypt and, oh, the rest of Northern Africa a dead zone. Then, possibly he might be ready to turn on the Indonesians, Malaysians, Nigerians, Sudanese (man, maybe there's the solution to Darfur, finally), Pakistanis (oh, never mind them, they've got the Bomb, maybe they can be bribed off). And after a billion dead, the Chinese will be an existential threat. There's another billion and a few right there.

It's not that I think the Muslims of the world should be exterminated, but because killing off a fraction of them is not going to help America. Either you kill them all, or you stop killing off their civilians (and, frankly, the US government should pay incredible reparations to the survivors, but the Americans will never do that either, they can do no wrong). Unfortunately, at this point, I don't think George W Bush, or Cheney and his gang know how. They *can't* stop. It would be too humiliating to their party and their ideology to be so wrong, and with so much blood on their hands. They have to go on. The only way they're going to stop is to be kicked out of office. But GW Bush has another two years to continue the killing. Possibly losing his majorities in both the House and the Senate will put a brake on the killing though. If only for that, I pray that the Republicans lose *big*. I normally root for Republicans since they are marginally (very marginally) more conservative and less stupidly leftist as the Democrats. But this year, and perhaps for another decade, they need to be kept away from the rest of the world. We'd rather not die, or be tortured, either by the US government or by countries to which the US will export us to be tortured. No thanks.

On trusting american foreign policy

From a post in The National Review, by Michael Rubin, one of the most powerful and lovely letters I have ever seen. On the other hand, the source is David Frum, so possibly it's not true, or, at any rate, is slanted toward untruth. But the letter itself is lovely, and it reflects on all american policy, not just whoever Frum's enemy at the time was.

Dear Excellency and Friend,

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on this spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we all are born and must die. I have only committed the mistake of believing you.

Sirik Matak, the author was offered the opportunity to leave with the Americans, he stayed in Phnom Penh instead and was shot in the stomach by the Khmer Rouge.

The post is meant to be a lesson for the "Abandon Iraq crowd". I don't see much point in that <rest of this rant deleted for being unworthy of Sirik Matak's memory>

The American Way of War

No, not really. I don't have either the time or the patience to find links, so I'm going to take a lot of quotes from one article out of context, and I'll generalize them.

The article is Korea: forgotten nuclear threats.

Napalm was invented at the end of the second world war. It became a major issue during the Vietnam war, brought to prominence by horrific photos of injured civilians. Yet far more napalm was dropped on Korea and with much more devastating effect, since the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations than North Vietnam.

and a bit further down:

“Men all around me were burned. They lay rolling in the snow. Men I knew, marched and fought with begged me to shoot them . . . It was terrible. Where the napalm had burned the skin to a crisp, it would be peeled back from the face, arms, legs . . . like fried potato chips” (2).

That's a quote about friendly fire, napalm being dropped on American troops, here's what they did to the civilians:

“The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck - a man about to get on his bicycle, 50 boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No 3,811,294 for a $2.98 ‘bewitching bed jacket - coral’.” US Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of “sensationalised reporting”, so it could be stopped (3).

One of the first orders to burn towns and villages that I found in the archives was in the far southeast of Korea, during heavy fighting along the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950, when US soldiers were bedevilled by thousands of guerrillas in rear areas. On 6 August a US officer requested “to have the following towns obliterated” by the air force: Chongsong, Chinbo and Kusu-dong. B-29 strategic bombers were also called in for tactical bombing. On 16 August five groups of B-29s hit a rectangular area near the front, with many towns and villages, creating an ocean of fire with hundreds of tons of napalm. Another call went out on the 20 August. On 26 August I found in this same source the single entry: “fired 11 villages” (4). Pilots were told to bomb targets that they could see to avoid hitting civilians, but they frequently bombed major population centres by radar, or dumped huge amounts of napalm on secondary targets when the primary one was unavailable.

MacArthur’s orders were “to destroy every means of communication and every installation, and factories and cities and villages. This destruction is to start at the Manchurian border and to progress south.” On 8 November 1950, 79 B-29s dropped 550 tons of incendiaries on Sinuiju, “removing [it] from off the map”. A week later Hoeryong was napalmed “to burn out the place”. By 25 November “a large part of [the] North West area between Yalu River and south to enemy lines is more or less burning”; soon the area would be a “wilderness of scorched earth” (7).

Without even using such “novel weapons” - although napalm was very new - the air war levelled North Korea and killed millions of civilians. North Koreans tell you that for three years they faced a daily threat of being burned with napalm: “You couldn’t escape it,” one told me in 1981. By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea had been completely levelled. What was left of the population survived in caves.

This is what the American military does best. In Iraq, the American invasion and occupation is directly and indirectly responsible for around 600,000 deaths.

That's only 600,000 though. I'm wondering when the Americans are going to get moving and kill off another million or two as they did in Vietnam. That's one good thing about modern media though, it keeps the Americans on notice that there's someone watching. So they only massacre piecemeal these days, instead of killing off a million civilians a year.

It's unfortunate that the American civilians don't learn anything. All they care about are the American dead and wounded. All they learn after another war is how to minimize American casualties by increasing enemy and civilian casualties.

I can hope that the international media can keep the Americans from Nuking Iran or North Korea, but given that George Bush is a nut (probably more of a nut now than when he started, frustration does that to nuts), as are most of his neoconservative cronies, although possibly Cheney is just in it for the war-profiteering, more war, more business for Halliburton), I don't bet too much on that. I'm not an American though and can't do anything about this situation. The Americans will have to clean it up for themselves. But since they don't learn, well, I don't have too much hope for that either. Maybe they'll kick out a lot of Republicans this November, but what good will that do? It'll probably just push Bush over the edge, that much closer to nuking someone, anyone.

Kids pray

Kids pray. Great post by Unaa at slibe.com.

And another image I can related to (although timmy isn't doing that yet, I think), is a baby's foot mark on a pregnant woman's belly. That's probably a photoshopped image though, given that the images is marked tonterias.com.

Now *that's* a fine rant

I hardly mean to imply that George W. Bush is a delusional party hack whose aim is to rob and mislead us for the benefit of his friends. That idea deserves to be stated outright: George W. Bush is a delusional party hack whose aim is to rob and mislead us for the benefit of his friends. What I mean to imply is that his free ride on our backs was made possible by the clever solution Congress found to its conundrum back in 1917: a law that deems guilty of a federal offense anyone who knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail . . . any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States . . . or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat. . . .

and there's more!

Here are those tropes: the president is ignorant; the president is cruel; the president is a zealot; the president is a tool of the corporations; the president hides his agenda from the people; the president's agenda endangers the people; the president is a thief; the president is a madman; the president is a fraternity boy; the president is a warlord; the president is a drunkard; the president is a criminal; the president is protected by his cronies; the president is a smug prevaricator; the president should be removed from office.

and yet again.

True, George W. Bush is an ignorant, cruel, closed-minded, avaricious, sneaky, irresponsible, thieving, brain-damaged frat boy with a drinking problem and a taste for bloodshed, whose numerous crimes have been abetted by the moral corruption of his party cohort and whose contempt for American military lives alone warrants his impeachment

How has it profited the people for their writers to argue that a wealthy, comfortable citizen deserves a wealthy, comfortable retirement when we all know full well that he has earned confinement and conviction and perhaps even a request for that barbaric death penalty he so loudly supports?

alright, that's only halfway through the article. now I want to enjoy the article without having to switch tabs and post more quotes here.

Ashamed to be an american - capitolhillblue.com

I've been reading Capitol Hill Blue for a few days. Saw it on reddit and followed some links. It seems to be strongly anti-Bush. Which is a comfortable thing for me, although I'm surprised that I'm reading Democrats and agreeing with them :-). That's just a phase though, probably. With GW Bush and his gang working so hard to destroy America from within (and, this is the part I care about, killing and burning in the wider world at the same time, where they might hit me and mine by mistake or on purpose), it's possible to agree with people who are misguided on many other issues most of the time :-).

I tend to agree with a lot of the people at LewRockwell.com which tends to the libertarian, I think. That's a bit more comfortable. I'm not a libertarian myself, but I tend to that side more than to the Democrats on the left or the Christian/Evangelist wing of the Republicans (on which side there are just as many nuts *cough*Pat Robertson*cough*Falwell*cough*cough*, as there are freaks on the democratic far-left).

It's not that strange that I think in terms of U.S. political parties. I lived in the U.S. for a bit and am pretty familiar with their politics and politicians. I might be more familiar with U.S. politicians than the majority of american citizens. and all because I read the Washington Post for the Redskins news and the opinion section on world issues :-).

No nukes

I take it back. It's possible, but not likely that the U.S. will nuke Iran. It's almost certain that it won't nuke North Korea either. It's still possible. GW Bush has a bunch of nuts (including, possibly, himself) in his gang, but perhaps sanity is breaking out in the White House. In any case, it's much more likely that if they do intend to nuke (or actually do nuke), it'll leak and the whole gang will be lynched. So, merely out of self preservation, they probably won't nuke.

There'll still be tens of thousands of dead (maybe 90% of them innocent civilians) on the ground if the U.S. decides to go to war, but perhaps that war with Iran can be averted.

I was surfing along on Reddit, when I saw this discussion of why the U.S. is the target of so much worldwide resentment. There are many sub-pages (I think the summaries of those subpages should have more information, I almost didn't click on the header entries to go to the details) and I haven't read it all. So I don't necessarily agree with that. I don't know much about the authors either, so I don't know what kind of spin they're putting on things. Reading it will certainly be educational though, either because it'll point at uncomfortable truths, or because the details will be wrogn, exposing the mistakes in the discussion, or (more likely), it'll be some mix of both, exposing the reader's prejudices as the discussion works as a rorschach, although one tilted toward the truth rather than being purely random.

The list of coups arranged or supported by the U.S. has 35 or so coups listed. I'm aware of some of those, I wasn't aware there were so many. Nor do I know how deeply the U.S. is involved (possibly, on one or another it was just a fellow traveler, supporting friends). I'll need to read up, possibly from some other sources since the krysstal site might not be objective (likely it's not objective, everyone has an agenda, but possibly the data are objective enough, particularly if counter-checked against other sources).

Wow, the List of U.S. military interventions is too long, I lost patience counting them. Again, as above, more reading is required. I wouldn't be surprised though if the U.S. comes out far the worst.

I tend to agree with the base site's prologue though, that *The American people are generally a friendly, kindly and compassionate people. If they knew one tenth of what their governments get up to around the world and in their dealings with foreign governments and people, there would be an enormous outcry.*. On the other hand, those same people, nice as they are individually, are also to blame because they are just so apathetic, enjoying the benefits of their nation's bullying of others and hiding the inconvenient facts from themselves. And in so doing, they think far too well of themselves as if the glory of the Founding Fathers (whose glory was earned with genius, privation and war) was their own glory, when all they do now is bask in the comfort earned from bullying the rest of the world (and, to be fair, from the economic vitality of american workers, their willingness to work harder than any other first-world nation, and the resources of a large landmass, and the resources of those they can bully).

That's really too bad. The U.S. could still be a city on a hill, a beacon and a guide to the world. It's going to be decades though, perhaps generations, before the evils of the last century or so of expansion can be forgotten.

More U.S. prisoner abuse discussion.

I wonder if america will listen. probably not yet. It'll be another decade or so of bullying the world before anything good comes out of Washington. And it's likely that it won't be much good. America won't have learned anything. Or if they do, it'll be the wrong thing. That next time they should just nuke the enemy, or kill 1/10th of the population pour encourager les autres.

although I wouldn't be surprised if they nuke Iran and North Korea before ten years are up. It's the same old-same old. non-citizens don't count for much against a single american life. It's their right to make that choice, when they're attacked. These days though, it's the americans roiling up the world and sowing war.

The above is not a prediction, just an assessment of likelihoods. I hope it doesn't come to pass, but the character of the U.S. government, and the apathy of the american public to the pain they cause outside their country are not improved by wishful thinking.

Inspiring - damn, those spaniards have style

Now, see, *this* is style. FC Barcelona will put the Unicef name on their jerseys AND ANNUALLY CONTRIBUTE more than a million dollars to Unicef, inspiring. Instead of making money on the jerseys (other teams make many millions of dollars a year for the brand name placement), they're PAYING to put UNICEF's name on their jerseys.

That's so far from The hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy they're not even in the same moral universe. Of course there's also bill gates and warren buffet giving so much money to charity, that's also inspiring, except not really since they have all that money and frankly, they're so rich they don't even feel human.

I'd consider immigrating to spain. or other points in Europe. I really like New Zealand, which is why sol and I are actually working and spending and investing real hard-earned money to immigrate there (it's nothing like a sure thing, we are doing what we can though, and we're hoping for the best). The U.S. though, much as I love individual americans, and in fact, generally, the people of the U.S.A., no, the politics and government, and foreign policy of that country are just so far on the evil side of things that I would never immigrate there.

I wish happiness to those who decide to immigrate there, and to those who were born there or have already immigrated. It's not for me though. And again, I wish the U.S. would fall back to its borders and stop threatening the rest of the world. Or if it wanted to do good, it could go to Darfur and do real good, instead of actively creating terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, likely, in the near future, in Iran, looks like George W Bush is spoiling for another fight so that the Republicans can campaign on GWOT and patriotism again, all this while he destroys his own country from the inside).

Atis season, Lanzones Season, and Camiguin Diving and fun

It's Atis season in the Philippines and I'm in hog heaven because of it. It's important to choose good atis (generally, large/fat scales) because the low quality atis aren't fleshy inside and are no fun to eat. I love the fruit. It's very sweet and satisfying when fleshy. It's a bit expensive in Manila, but then that's why salaries are higher here too, to compensate for the high prices and the general misery of city life (not that much of a problem now, since I'm very happily married, we're excited about the baby and I just don't go out. Home is wonderful (as is fast internet.

I just saw a post that said that Atis seeds are toxic (pounded into a paste, they are used to kill head lice). Fortunately I've never been tempted to swallow Atis seeds (not the case with lanzones and santol).

It's also Lanzones season. And it's going to be Lanzones Festival on Camiguin. Sol and I both wish we could go. We can't though, she's into her 8th month of pregnancy now and I don't think they let you on a plane at that late stage. Not that we could afford to go anyway, work is crazy (but great fun), and we couldn't Dive on Camiguin anyway, we miss diving at the unfished reserves on Mantigue Island and off White Island, and sol hasn't been to the great dive site off Sunken Cemetery yet. Maybe in May. When we were taking our advanced open water diver course, we had our night dive at

Tangub bay.
That was great fun. I didn't realize that there would be so many lionfish (even mating lionfish!) at Tangub at night, and we saw a lot of shrimp (easy to see at night, their eyes shine, hard to see in the daytime since they're almost transparent), sleeping/non-moving fish, and a very large cuttlefish which, when it got irritated by us shining lights on it, inked up and zoomed away so fast we could hardly see it.

This is from our

pre-wedding dive (the morning of the wedding, my mom thought we were nuts diving in the morning and marrying in the afternoon :-) at Mantigue island.

I miss Camiguin. Before I met sol, I lived in Cagayan de Oro and I'd go to Camiguin every weekend. I'd buy some fruits at the fruit stand and drive up to

Katibawasan Fallsand eat them there.

For our wedding, we had

Friends and Family with us. Lots of fun at the waterfalls and all around the island, including


White Island where, I think that's Paco snorkeling across my brother-in-law's perfect picture, I think this is where Paco was following the giant purple sea slug which was sliding along the shallow bottom there.

All right, this appreciation of the lovely Atis is getting away from me now. time to end it here :-)

clogged head

I've been, too slowly, recovering from the head cold, fever, chest cold, cough that I developed last week. Apart from the main problems, I was also dizzy much of the time. Still am, really. But things are getting better. I'll probably be able to go to work tomorrow (Wed). I'd like to go to work TODAY, but sol suggests resting until all the symptoms are gone. And, much as I'd like to work today, I can't contradict massive common sense. Ah well. Tomorrow.

The thing with a clogged head (haha, clogged sinuses, dizziness and the clogged headedness that all feels like) is that I can't even work remotely. Well, I could, but I doubt if the results would be any good.

St Luke's visa health tests

Sol and I spent five days or so going to the St Luke's diagnostics facility in Ermita. We're applying for immigration to New Zealand (prettier, less stressful than the U.S., among the least corrupt countries on earth, it's going to be a great place to raise a family). As part of that process, we both had to undergo a bunch of tests. I got some extra tests added on, so we had to spend more time there.

St Luke's has the best blood extractors I have ever met :-). Everytime I've had to have blood taken (including when I gave blood for my stepfather's surgery, when the med techs were very, very good) there's been a problem. At St Luke's too, there was a problem. It seems I have thick skin (the needle gets dull as it goes in) and the vein is shy (it moves away from the dull needle). But the med tech was very good. She stuck me in the right, the vein didn't like it, she stuck me on the left arm, and that worked very well. She was done before I knew it.

Overall, the service there is very good. One of my friends didn't like the way the staff told her where to go, but I think she was just being over sensitive. It's a very efficient system. I would get upset too if the system were inefficient, with to-ing and fro-ing in illogical and wasteful movements. But they really do have a very efficient system. Everyone knows exactly what to do, and they do it very well. Everyone is always pleasant too. As well they should be. I'm sure that St Luke's contract with the American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand embassies for providing health screening services is very lucrative. I'm sure they put their best people there.

The system is also designed to be secure. As, again, it should be. Naturally, they don't want the records to be tampered with, or the doctors to be reached and influenced. They've got good safeguards in the system to make such tampering very difficult (nothing is impossible).

I had a hell of a time producing phlegm for the sputum test though. The doctors are very thorough and they added tests which, while someone else might have considered them unnecessary, if viewed objectively, were clearly easy to justify and not merely a matter of padding the bill (every test added to the costs, fortunately, we could cover those costs). I'd had lung damage a few years back, from a motorcycle accident. The doctors saw something suspicious in the lungs and, despite the knowledge of the accident, they ordered extra lung X-rays and the sputum test anyway. This was for detecting tuberculosis. Again, reasonable, and I have no quarrel with the choice. It would have been nice to have been spared, but it was understandable to have had that added on.

But again, I had a hell of a time producing the sample. One has to cough and produce sputum or "plema" from the lungs. And I had no lung problems (it had been perhaps 5 months since I last had a cough). I just couldn't produce anything. On the third day though (three samples are required, on consecutive days), I finally produced a good sample. I'd gotten a cold and a cough, perhaps from the cold airconditioning at St Lukes and at work, but also from being in the rain for a short while after work. So finally I coughed up something that looked like brains and that satisfied the medtechs.

All in all, I'm happy with St Luke's. It's a very good hospital, they have very, very good people there. It's expensive, but for this, and for things like Sol's ovarian cyst removal and upcoming giving birth, it's worthwhile.