population propaganda

bookmarked for later reading

BBC

Powerline

more AFP story in Inquirer

also AFP: philippine baby is number 7 billion.

they are pushing birth control here for our public clinics to impose it on our people (you can get it at private clinics, but never mind) and notice the part about pushing sex ed in the article

Why I rarely read novels

I never liked novels much, although I do read some SciFi and historical novels.

The reason is that the subject matter not only seems boring, but seems to be out of touch with the reality I have actually seen (and believe me, I have seen a lot of stuff).

Take the two latest podcasts on the PhilLibrary podcast:

One, with Jennifer Egan:

According to the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Egan writes with "an admirably deft touch, but more impressive than her craftsmanship is the emotional authenticity she achieves."

So what is this "authenticity"?

In A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan explores the human desire for immortality, escape, and redemption through music as she weaves the stories of an aging punk rocker and the young woman he employs.

ah yes, an aging drug addled promiscuous "punk rocker". Who presumably is someone we are supposed to care about (aside from telling him to get real and take a bath, I mean)

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award, Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule examines the rough-and-tumble world of cheap horseracing through the eyes of five flawed characters trying to make a living in rural West Virginia.

Do they have horseracing in West Virginia? Again, "flawed" suggests not folks with extended families trying to make a living and raising their kids, but again drug addicted promiscous hillbillies.

... Gordon's previous novels include Bogeywoman, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and She Drove Without Stopping, an American Library Association Notable Book. Centered on a run-down amusement park in the Florida Everglades and chronicling one family's struggle to stay afloat in a sinking world, Karen Russell's debut novel Swamplandia! is "lavishly imagined and spectacularly crafted,"

"Lavishly imagined"...yeah.

WONDER HOW MANY "REDNECKS" SHE ACTUALLY KNOWS IN PERSON?


the other podcast isn't much better:

British author Alan Hollinghurst received the Man Booker Prize for his fourth book, The Line of Beauty, an elegiac account of cash, cars, cocaine, and coming out in 1980s London. Celebrated for his intrepid achievements in gay fiction since his debut with The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst's novels are enriched with a playful wit and a powerful eroticism

ah, but we will get the role of the predatory gay man played by a predatory woman in this one:

The Stranger's Child is a saga that begins in 1913, the last summer before the First World War, and spans the 20th century, depicting the intrusion of war and the unfolding drama of a literary conceit. "A smart, witty, charming, dry martini of a novel," according to David Nicholls, Rules of Civility marks Manhattan investment banker Amor Towles' literary debut. This elegant New York City love letter opens on the last night of 1937 in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where narrator Katey Kontent-a young woman of "formidable intellect, bracing wit, and uncommonly good legs"-happens upon a well-heeled banker who will multiply her social orbit and augment her professional credentials over the course of a watershed year.

yes, I presume there are such predatory folks like this, but you know, I don't especially want to spend a few hours with them.

Can you spell "NARCISSISM"?

Manila's new Bishop

a background on the new bishop of Manila at Whispers in the loggia.

All of 54, Luis Antonio Tagle (left) represents a dramatic generational shift from his now-predecessor, 79 year-old Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales. And as soon as late next year -- by which point the Philippines' traditional group of papal electors will all have aged out of a hypothetical conclave -- the prelate widely seen as a "Bishop of the Poor" is likely to become the youngest Latin-church member of the scarlet-clad College that'll elect B16's successor.

in the Philippines, the next question is who he is related to. From the Bulletin:

But under Rosales, the influence of the Manila archdiocese was tempered, althhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifough not necessarily less belligerent.

Rosales has led public protests against the RH bill, although he has achieved minor successes in galvanizing public support, compared with Sin.

Church observers say that under Tagle, Church and State relations may improve a bit, owing to Tagle’s close ties with the Cojuangcos, President Benigno Aquino III’s relatives.

so the UN is "bribing" PNoy to get population control by appointing his sister, an actress, as one of their "ambassadors", and the Pope is "bribing" PNoy by appointing a bishop with family connections.

Yup. Filipino politics.

more approval here.

we live in the provinces, so it's not our bishop involved.

First Canada then the USA, then force the Philippines?

Gay Caswell has a running feud on with the government for their policies that are ruining the "first nations" (I link to her blog because many of these problems were found on the midwestern reservations in the US where I worked at the IHS Hospitals).

Today she rewrites the ten commandments as she sees how the social gospel morphs into pure politics that persecutes the non conformer.

Let’s evaluate the NDP in light of the TEN COMMANDMENTS

I. Thou shalt have no other God but God. To an NDPer the NDP becomes their creed, their loyalty, their philosophy and life style. Their graven images are the Family of Crown Corporations ( government control of business), the civil servants who work to run our lives, their Sturdy Stone Building, Fines Building, SaskPower Taj Mahal are their graven images. It used to be described as Making the Revolution. Now it is more like Maintaining Power so we can be our own god ....



3. Thou shalt keep the Sabbath Holy. If God is not God then out of expedience we can have activities that squeeze God out of Sunday, the Sabbath for Christians.


4. Honour Your Father and Mother. This Commandment makes it clear that the first authority and government is the Family. When people attack the authority of parents they are attacking the first and most important governmental institution. Socialists such as the NDP always work to denegrate and replace the Family. They do not want parents to be in control of health care such as vetoing abortion and contraception for minors. They do not wants parents to have educational choice. In the North the NDP pushed out Catholic education and educational choice. They push sex education that attacks morality and the family. They push psycho games such as Magic Circle that violate the privacy of the home and teach children to despise their parents. They push government raising children at the earliest age.

5. Thou shalth not kill. The NDP have been and are in the fore front of pushing abortion which is killing unborn babies and euthanasia which is killing the sick, imperfect and elderly. They had a policy platform in 1981 that any hospital which refuses to kill babies will not get government funds. As soon as they were back in power in 1991 they began destroying Catholic hospitals including St. Paul’s maternity ward....

you may want to go to her blog to see what you may face in another ten years (or another two years if Obama stays in office and you live in a pc state such as California or Minnesota).

Ironically, although I saw the federal gov't and the state gov't in Minnesota pushing these things on our people, it was the tribes who opposed much of this.

The IHS won't pay for abortions because most of the staff is prolife and most of the tribes object to paying for abortions (The two abortions I saw were of really life threatening cases, which I knew the patients but was not involved, but learned about from their history).

A similar "problem" for the federal gov't occurred when they tried to make military hospitals do abortions.

However, Obama's health care law mandates abortion pills as "preventive care" and one wonders who will be willing to say no to this.

the Catholic bishops are up in arms, but the press is silent.

As for the elderly, they just refused to sign "Do not resusitate" orders. We tried to get them to do it but they wouldn't. Then we had a lady aspirate food, and the Emergency room doc saw that order and didn't send her off to get the emergency bronchoscopy that would have saved her life. When one of our docs heard, he ran to the ER but she was terminal and died. After that, we stopped pushing our patients.

the third secret

the Philippine Inquirer has a good article on the third secret of Fatima

The Countess of Medjugorje

I had read that one of the Hapsburg countesses was living in Medjugorje, but that was years ago.

Apparantly she is still there. From the Philippine Inquirer:

Here, clearly, was a person who had succeeded in transcending the trappings of “royalty” to focus exclusively on the more important aspects of life that now mattered most to her.

They were mostly significantly led by the spiritual mission that had prompted her many years ago to uproot herself and her family and live in the Marian apparition site of Medjugorje, a small village in the former Yugoslavia.

Unexpected blessing

June had invited some religious and lay leaders to have lunch with Milona and listen to her sharing, not about her privileged life and lineage, but about her unique mission in Medjugorje, and the deeply transformative effect it has had on her and her loved ones.

First off, June revealed to us that Milona’s visit was in itself an unexpected blessing, because she had not been scheduled to come here, certainly not this year. Recently, however, quite out of the (Marian?) blue, some Filipino friends requested her to pay a private visit to Dumaguete City to join a big religious celebration at the cathedral, and to Cagayan de Oro, to help mark the 10th anniversary of a religious radio program that promotes two of her most cherished involvements—Medjugorje itself, and the charitable movement known as Mary’s Meals.

Milona was scheduled to stay in the Philippines for only a few days, but June has been friends with her for years, so she succeeded in persuading her to spend a couple of days in Manila to speak at a couple of events, before she flew back home via Rome, where a visit had also been arranged for her with the Philippine envoy to the Vatican, Mercy Tuason....