grim reaper shadows pig world

About a quarter of the global pig population is expected to die as a result of an epidemic of African swine fever (ASF), according to the intergovernmental organisation responsible for coordinating animal disease control.
In the last year the spread of the disease has taken policymakers by surprise, and has been particularly devastating in China – home to the world’s largest pig population. The disease is also established in other Asian countries such as Vietnam and South Korea, and continues to wreak havoc in eastern Europe, where the current outbreak began in 2014.

cheering for Trump boo's

U.S. President Donald Trump got booed at one World Series game. Other people may be more serene about it, but I have to admit the incident made me feel like a man who hasn't bathed in 40 days and 40 nights and finally gets a shower ... and wallows in it.

This compendium was passed along by a likewise-scuzzy email friend.

another perspective on U.S. cities

Idly watching a TV documentary about New Orleans the other night, I heard words attributed to an author whose name I have forgotten. The words, pretty nearly, were these:

There are three cities in the United States. There is New York. There is San Francisco. And there is New Orleans. Everything else is Cleveland.

There is something almost Mark Twain about the observation. It makes me giggle. I can feel some kind of dig intended.

Anyway it tickled my ivories.

foundations ashudder

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Catholic bishops from across the Amazon called Saturday for the ordination of married men as priests to address the clergy shortage in the region, an historic proposal that would upend centuries of Roman Catholic tradition....

Some conservatives and traditionalists have warned that any papal opening to married priests or women deacons would lead the church to ruin. They accused the synod organizers and even the pope himself of heresy for even considering flexibility on mandatory priestly celibacy.

They vented their outrage most visibly this week when thieves stole three indigenous statues featuring a naked pregnant woman from a Vatican-area church and tossed them to into the Tiber River.

 Imagine that ... "heresy" in this day and age.

rivers suck up carbon

In the turbid, frigid waters roaring from the glaciers of Canada’s high Arctic, researchers have made a surprising discovery: for decades, the northern rivers secretly pulled carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a rate faster than the Amazon rainforest.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, flip the conventional understanding of rivers, which are largely viewed as sources of carbon emissions.

I sense that this is important, but it is above my intellectual pay grade or energy level.

World Lemur Day

Friday is World Lemur Day. Lemurs are the earth’s most threatened larger group of mammals; there are more than 100 species and almost all are under threat of extinction. Bristol Zoological Society has been studying lemurs and working on their conservation in north-west Madagascar for over 10 years

fomer SecDef James Mattis

I want to remember former defense/war secretary James Mattis who opined a week ago at a safe-sex black-tie roast of President Donald Trump that he (Mattis) had won his spurs on the battlefield "He (Trump) won his (bone) spurs from a doctor."

Trump, who never met an appointee he couldn't malign after the appointee was shown the inevitable exit, "denounced Mattis as “the most overrated general” when he met members of Congress on Wednesday to discuss his recent controversial decision to pull US troops out of Syria."

Sometimes I wonder if there is a difference between a physical and a moral coward.

super duper computer speed

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google announced Wednesday it has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing, saying it has developed an experimental processor that took just minutes to complete a calculation that would take the world’s best supercomputer thousands of years.

The feat could open the door someday to machines so blazingly fast that they could revolutionize such tasks as finding new medicines, developing vastly smarter artificial intelligence systems and, most ominously, cracking the encryption that protects some of the world’s most closely guarded secrets.

Wowsers! I guess. Super-duper-whooper speed... for as long as the electricity is on.

Meanwhile, as a footnote perhaps,

LOS ANGELES — Hundreds of thousands of residents of Northern California whose power will be shut off in the next two days got even worse news Wednesday: Another, even larger, blackout is likely over the weekend.

The state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Corp., or PG&E, began shutting off electricity to nearly a half-million people Wednesday afternoon, the second massive blackout in two weeks. It said hot, dry winds and low humidity were creating a high risk of sparks and "rapid wildfire spread" from its long-neglected power lines.

And, as a P.P.S. as I skim the news wires this morning, I have yet to find any tale that addresses the question of an EMP (electro-magnet pulse) bomb that targets electrical capacities. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

paralympian commits suicide

I wish you what you wish.

Paralympian Marieke Vervoort said when the day arrived, she had signed the euthanasia papers and was prepared to end her life. That day came on Tuesday in her native Belgium, her death confirmed in a statement from the city of Diest.
Vervoort, 40, won gold and silver medals in 2012 at the London Paralympics in wheelchair racing, and two more medals three years ago in Rio de Janeiro.
In an interview at the Paralympics in Rio, Vervoort described living with unbroken pain from an incurable, degenerative spinal disease. She talked of sleeping only 10 minutes some nights, described severe pain that caused others to pass out just watching her, and detailed how sport kept her alive.

The smug sorrows of those who lived to see the day are not enough. What is it that compels people to withhold best wishes to those who have chosen? Why should the blessing I hope for be the blessing you have chosen?

Blessings.

I wish you what you wish.

serious H2O concerns

CAIRO (AP) — The latest breakdown in talks with Ethiopia over its construction of a massive upstream Nile dam has left Egypt with dwindling options as it seeks to protect the main source of freshwater for its large and growing population.

Talks collapsed earlier this month over the construction of the $5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is around 70% complete and promises to provide much-needed electricity to Ethiopia’s 100 million people....

The Nile supplies more than 90% of Egypt’s freshwater. Egyptians already have one of the lowest per capita shares of water in the world, at around 570 cubic meters per year, compared to a global average of 1,000. Ethiopians however have an average of 125 cubic meters per year.

**************************

A 120-year-old lighthouse has been put on wheels and rails to move it away from the North Sea, which has been eroding the coastline of north-western Denmark.
When the 23-metre (75ft) Rubjerg Knude lighthouse was first lit in 1900, it was roughly 200 metres from the coast; now it is about only six.

Call me an alarmist, but I hope my son's pistol is somewhere around this house.

"Spiderwoman"

Indonesia’s Aries Susanti Rahayu broke the women’s speed climbing world record

take an ax to the door

Like thin eddies slipping up a low-tide beach...

There's a house for sale across the street -- all spanky and yellow and inviting occupancy ...Hershel's house that for so long was a kind of French blue. Hershel was like a half-hewn log of a man. He had a bum leg from his time in the Korean War. He was loud and his apartment in the now-yellow house was stacked with books he read. Hershel wasn't quite right, but he never did me any harm.

Once Hershel missed his meds and went around in the night with an ax, chopping at the front doors of several other neighbors who for some reason offended him ...  millennial types who had never been to Korea and knew about Mozart. Hershel made mincemeat of several doors, but not mine and I was always sort of proud of myself that my door remained intact. They said Hershel was crazy, but hell, he just had ghosts, like the rest of us.

Dave Pottinger, another chum of the past, said that in Korea, the North Korean forces would steal into American lines in the night. No one ever heard them. The North Korean forces wore sneakers. You could tell from the foot prints. Sneaked into American lines and chopped off the heads of soldiers in the foxholes and snuck away. There was no noise: Maybe that was the worst of it. No heads, but no noise. Did Hershel and Dave see the same things? Did they bring with them the same ghosts? Dave wasn't as crazy as Hershel, but he had been to similar asylums. Silence ... headless silence.

If ghosts sneak in, there is no sneaking them out, I guess. A noiseless permanence. A violent, vile silence. No joke. Doors reduced to kindling in a carefully-coiffed neighborhood.. Who forgot to take his meds?

I wonder who will buy the now-spanky yellow house across the street.

Somebody hustled Hershel off to an old-age home. Or maybe he's dead. I miss him and I miss his ax, but the wispy, ghosty pride I once felt lingers.

Sometimes Mozart reminds me of it all.

House for sale: It's a two-family.

mind-fucker du jour

What happens if your mind lives for ever on the internet?

It may be some way off, but mind uploading, the digital duplication of your mental essence, could expand human experience into a virtual afterlife

In the P. Lal translation of "The Dhammapada," the words are attributed to Gautama the Buddha:

All fear dying.
All fear death.

The fact that anyone might want to live, in whatever form, forever strikes me as a strong piece of evidence. Why would anyone even consider living forever, let alone take a shot at it? And ... is anyone likely to be any happier?

Still, talk about a mind-fucker.

Escape death????? Your aunt Fannie!

It's all enough to consider the gracious exit that might be provided by the barrel of a .38 placed beneath the chin.

mothers and fathers

The old doggerel asserts itself:

A daughter's a daughter
Until she's a wife.
A woman's a mother
The rest of her life.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no parallel aphorism for a father.

Or maybe, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach" will do?

dying is for the other guy

Warning: this story is about death. You might want to click away now.

Pete Buttigieg's tragedy

Living as I do in a land that sometimes feels awash in self-satisfied sensitivities, it was a pleasure the other day to catch a TV snippet in which Democrat presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg (how does he pronounce that name?), mayor of South Bend, Ind., responded to an interviewer whose sensitivities appeared to be over the top.

Sure, he worried about the trashmasher a gay man might face in a presidential race, but he also took time to care for others. "I grew up gay in Indiana," he said more or less. "I can take care of myself." But he worried for those (like his husband perhaps) who might be caught in the political blowback.

Buttigieg said no more about it, but his words lingered in my mind. This was a person of substance on my radar, a man who might be willing to say, "If I want you in my bedroom, I'll invite you." He doesn't say it but he doesn't back away from the issue either. Eyewash "transparency" and "caring" and "empathy" and "democracy" and "freedom" and unexamined "socialism" (yoo-hoo... Jesus was a socialist) could all take a hike where the issues of the day meant trouble for the country.

People get ignored. People get hurt. That's people!

Ignorance is no excuse.

Hurting afflicts one and all.

That's people, people.

Buttigieg will probably slide off the Democrat roster of those alleging they want to be president. But for the moment, I like the cut of an intelligent man's jib. Buttigieg's Texas-Hold-'Em delivery and presentation and intelligence appeals to me....

But no one cares much, I suppose. Donald Trump is busy getting impeached of late and the airwaves are full of the moment-to-moment revelations on that score.

In the long-ago-and-far-away, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, widow of solo pilot Charles Lindbergh, was asked in a TV interview how it felt to have her toddler son kidnapped in 1932. The interviewer had to ask the question. And Lindbergh, if I had to guess, knew it was coming. There was a long pause after the question was asked. And then Lindbergh responded

"I think everyone has suffered a tragedy."

And ain't that the truth? Everyone has suffered a tragedy and everyone has to move on. Homosexual, heterosexual, sensitive and insensitive alike -- everyone has suffered a tragedy, no matter how grievous the wails.

Pete Buttigieg struck me as having a handle on his own scrapes and bruises. Who knows if he has actually risen above the pains he may have suffered? But whether he has or hasn't, his candidacy does not seem to be laced with any smug whining.

There is serious stuff at hand. The earth is not flat. I am not the center of the universe. Idealism turns invariably towards dictatorship when given half a chance. Can it be avoided? Probably not.

eyes on the prize

If smoking were my worst habit, I reckon I'd be a genius. Everybody's got a tit one way or another and I've got mine ... and then some.

N-E-X-T.

Strange thought to be 69 years old and resolved into a scullery maid ... washing up the dishes from last night, putting away the clean plates and flat ware.

I thought I might not make it this morning (fatigue nuzzled and nudged), but, having started on the chore, I completed it and it was time for a cigarette. Keep your eyes on the prize.

"Eyes on the prize" -- how's that for a bad habit and a tasty tit?

Lord save me from my beliefs!

arrogance near and far

Arrogance is an interesting commodity ... one of which I am all too capable.

Still, didja ever wonder about the New York Times -- a diminishing bulwark in the American journalistic world -- and the fact that to this very day, it still bears the quote of one of its scions ... on the front page .... every day:

"All the News
That's Fit to Print"

When I was growing up in the 1940's and imagined that newspapers were for grown-ups, the U.S.S.R. had somewhere between 10 and 13 time zones (depending on who was counting and how) and yet on any given day, the newspaper might run precisely NO stories about our storied enemy. None. Zero. Zilch. 200 plus-or-minus million population and not one story fit to print? 13 fucking time zones.

Adolph S. Ochs, the owner of the Times, coined the phrase in 1897 as a means of stating the impartiality of his product. It may ring tinny these days, but by 1897, European countries had gathered in Berlin (1885) to divvy up the colonial spoils of Africa. Where there were no boundaries, the countries drew the lines in ... straight lines that remain today as markers of colonial arrogance. It wouldn't do for gentlemen to squabble over the spoils.

The late 1800's and early 1900's were likewise the time when men might gather for cigars after dinner and chortle about the notion of a Mother's Day. What did women -- then often seen as chattel -- expect? Their job was to make and care for babies ... and move on. Vote? Forgetaboutit!

My mother once said that if women reporters were going to be dismissed as "news hens," shouldn't men reporters be known as "news cocks?" It was a time of men and cigars and slavery and ... arrogance.

But no one who's in the throes of arrogance -- liberal, conservative, whatever -- ever imagined his or her approach might be arrogant. Oh no ... my approach is caring and thoughtful and sensitive whereas yours ... well, I'm not so sure about that.

Takes me back to school days:

I love myself
I think I'm grand.
I go to the movies
And hold my hand.
I put my arm
Around my waist.
And when I'm fresh,
I slap my face.

"anti-Semitism" again

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in 2017. First amendment advocates see the potential spread of such laws as a major threat to free speech on campuses. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Rightwing activists are attempting to spread new laws across Republican-controlled states that would ban criticism on public university campuses of Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territory.

Lord knows the Guardian can be rightly accused of skepticism at a minimum when it comes to the burnished reputation Israel would like to maintain, but it's tiring in the U.S. seeing the word "anti-semitisim" repeatedly co-opted and used to mean anti-Jewish.

It's all a great diversion for corruption-draped Benjamin Netanyahu to sweep up support among American Jews who claim to remember a vile and violent Holocaust ... but ... well ... stay away from the kids ... stay away from thinking ... stay away from confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians in which Palestinians seem always to be armed with knives while the Israelis bring guns and shoot Palestinians dead: Hell, even the Chicago police aren't that brazen.

"Never again."

And yet the Israelis paint themselves into a corner when the very tactics that stained European streets in the 1930's now stain the streets of a hard-won homeland. Why must those who suggest there was a time when Arabs and Jews got along ... oh well, never mind.... Netanyahu's corruptions linger and linger and seek cover and seek cover.

"Never again" is one of those lines that fairly begs its hearers to ... well ... try it again.

marathon run in under 2 hours

Eliud Kipchoge crosses the finish line in first-ever sub two-hour marathon.

"flash drought"

CARTERSVILLE, Ga. (AP) — A furnace-like “flash drought” is intensifying as it blasts away the little moisture left across a vast swath of the South, wilting garden plants and raising alarm among farmers, according to a weekly report updated Thursday.

Nearly 56 million residents are now living in drought conditions in parts of 16 Southern states, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor report. That drought is classified as extreme in areas in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida. From the arid plains of Texas to farms in Maryland, concern is spreading that cattle, cotton and corn are suffering after a summer of record highs and very little rain.

Dhammapada verse

If you find no equal or
Better in life,
Go alone.

Loneliness is preferable
To the company
Of fools.

Such is my probably-flawed recollection of one verse in the P. Lal translation of "The Dhammapada."

autumnal habits

About a half-mile out, a small herd of Canada geese headed north yesterday as I looked out the porch door. I couldn't hear their honk-snort-swallowing from a distance, but I knew they were probably talking, one to the next, as they flew. It was a first taste of autumn. The geese fly through this neck of the woods every year and rest at varying water pools along the way.

On the ground, frabjous jays are strutting and just D-double-daring you to contradict them. What cheeky devils they are. "When you mess with us, you mess with the best" they seem to say. And so another season gets its lift-off.

As Dylan Thomas might say, "Time passes. Listen! Time passes."

no good deed goes unpunished

Three Spanish police officers who were thrown into the sea when their boat crashed early during a high-speed chase were pulled to safety by the drug-smugglers they were chasing, police said.
The unexpected rescue happened on Friday after a police vessel began pursuing a speedboat “with four people on board that was suspected of transporting drugs” in waters off the southern coast of Spain, a police statement said....
The gesture did not spare them, however, when police found three tonnes of hashish in the water nearby.
“They were arrested for drug trafficking,” a police statement said, indicating that more than 80 bundles of hash had been recovered from the sea.

patriotism

Let me get this straight:
My country is run on moral cowardice
And you expect me to be a patriot.
Is that it?

greatest change in 20th century

If asked, I imagine those who waxed in the 20th century might point to the internet as the single biggest game-changer. Culture, relationships, information -- the internet shifted the tectonics of life.

My mother, by contrast, once observed that the single biggest change in the 20th century was "the loss of servants."

The same or different, I'm not sure.

As Donald Trump works his way back to a society with servants, he confronts the internet with its over-the-top references to "democracy" and "transparency" and "patriotism" and "empathy" and "freedom."

I dunno ... it just crossed my mind. Servitude is so much easier, but it can make people crabby.