Muhammed, Muhammeeeed

 

Någon på Aftonbladet tycker att det här är roligt. Jag antar att de syftar på Blondies gamla låt "Maria". Vilken tur att det inte finns polska katolska terroristgrupper. Än så länge.

Den bisarra rubriken är från startsidan. Själva artikeln har en mer lämplig rubrik...

Polsk miljardär bakom gigantisk Mariastaty

Ignorera bruset

 

Och ta en kaka till? Nja, inte riktigt kanske...

Ignorera bruset - först då är krisen över

No more wars

 

This is *not* the Finnish entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. In fact, it´s not an ESC song at all, but a new version of a classical Euro-disco hit from Moldova. Note the marching Russian (?) female cadets?!

Donald, plz don´t start any new wars over this song, plz plz plz. LOL.

A propos a previous blog post...

Daylight

 

An interesting piece (is it inspired by Vangelis?) called "Daylight". A propos the summer solstice, and so on. 

Invasion of the pestiferous Jesii

 

An one-hour video featuring various religious figures claiming to be Jesus (or something to that effect). Or in one case claiming that *another* guy is the Messiah (who isn´t even in on the show). Geezus! Most of the people featured are cult leaders or just plain insane, but a few more intriguing characters have been included. 

For instance, an American faith-healer and evangelist starring the Christ in a play, adressing a huge crowd in Kenya in his Jesus attire. The Internet trolls were soon all over the situation, claiming that the Savior had appeared in the East African nation. There is also the story of a psychiatrist who placed three mental patients who each claimed to be Jesus in the same room as an experiment. Or what about the Jesus who ran for mayor of Tokyo? Note also that some women have claimed or been proclaimed "Jesus"...

I admit that I probably would have preferred the original version.  

 

Folkmord

 

ICC har äntligen lyckats hitta *någon* att lagföra. Kan ju bli en intressant rättegång. Särskilt om det visar sig att det faktiskt var kriminella gäng The Punisher utplånade...  

Duterte anklagas för folkmord på kriminella

The golden child

 

Or just the Golden Triangle as per usual? No idea what to make of this. Probably just another confused conspiracy theory. I think its promotion is connected to the recent spike in gold prices and the latest Bitcoin bubble. 

The case of the Gold Buddhas  

John Konrad on X: OP and thread

Acrimonious

 

In case you think American politics are acrimonious. The vice president of the Philippines, Sara Duterte, recently stated that if somebody kills her, a paid assassin will take out the president, his wife and the speaker of the (Filipino) House of Representatives?! Note also that Sara Duterte is the daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte, otherwise known as "The Punisher"...

What´s going on here, I think, is that the current president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, was elected on an anti-American platform. The equally anti-American Sara Duterte was his (de facto) running mate. Once in office, however, Marcos became pro-American instead, leading to a permanent political crisis in the Philippines, since the president and the vice president now have completely different foreign policy orientations. 

Some time ago, Rodrigo Duterte threatened to create a breakaway republic on the island of Mindanao, and the drama has apparently not abated...   

Filipino vice president threatens to have the president assassinated

Exorcise this!

 

Credit: Roel Balingit

Another unrecognized Marian apparition, this time in the Philippines. The supporters tried to silence the criticism from the Catholic hierarchy by using the country´s de facto blasphemy laws against an exorcist who questioned the apparation!   

Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces

Mediatrix of All Graces offending religious feelings case

Verdict

 

 

Verdict: Entertainment Value Only. I have a soft spot for Bigfoot, so the first clip was fun to watch, featuring a very venerable Jeff Meldrum and (surprise) Cliff Barackman of "Finding Bigfoot" fame. The second clip contains too much BS and hoaxes, but sure, I suppose it could be entertaining after a fashion... 

Punisher no more?

 

Some news from the Philippines. As I suspected, Ferdinand Marcos (the younger) has "turned". He was supposed to become the anti-American and pro-Chinese kind-of-handpicked successor to populist strongman Rodrigo "The Punisher" Duterte, who had to resign from the presidency due to term limits. Instead, Marcos has turned away from Beijing and is looking to Taipeh and Washington DC for support. Not clear if the vice president, Sara Duterte (yes, she is the Punisher´s daughter), has turned likewise! 

The whole thing has become a colorful family drama, but there are obviously other factors involved, too. Which ones? No idea. Maybe American interests are simply stronger, maybe its geopolitically risky in any case for the Philippines to become pro-Chinese. Duterte himself led a bloody war against drugs and drug cartels, and hence accuse Marcos of being a "cocaine user". And cartel asset? 

Note that Duterte talks about making Mindanao secede from the Philippines. Probably just an empty threat coming from him, but there are already Muslim separatists on the island, so who knows what rabble might be stirred up by this conflict...   

Duterte "returns", calls Marcos a cocaine user

Change we can believe in

 

I assumed this was the pro-Chinese candidate? Note the absurd family name of the Chinese spokeswoman. Note also the name of the Filipino president...

Some things never change, it seems! 

Rift between China and the Philippines?

QAnon takes over town, JW´s allow beards!

 

Just another Tuesday in exoteric la-la-land. A weird QAnon cult tries to take over a small town in Saskatchewan, the cult apparently being headed by a self-appointed "Queen of Canada" who is really Filipino?! Meanwhile, the Jehovah´s Witnesses has taken the momentous decision to allow its male members to wear beards!   

Journey to Sahul

 

Credit: Kanguole

“Denisova´s Mystery” is a French documentary from 2022 about the discovery of a “third human form” in a cave in Siberia. The docu features Svante Pääbo, who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for his extraction of DNA from Neanderthal bones. As for the “third form” humans (really more like the 57^th form at this stage), they are known as Denisovans, named after the Russian cave in which their remains were discovered.

The Denisovans were “archaic” humans and probably looked more like Neanderthals than Homo sapiens. Just like the Neanderthals, however, the Denisovans (who survived until about 15,000 years ago) have contributed to the gene pool of Homo sapiens. The documentary speculates that the Denisovans may be ancestral to both Tibetans and Chinese, perhaps giving the former the genes necessary to live at high altitudes. Apparently, Chinese researchers are intrigued by the possibility that the Denisovans may be the forefathers and Ur-mothers of the Chinese people. Dare I guess that some kind of nationalism may be behind this interest? Note also how recent science moves ever closer to the previously disregarded "multi-regional" hypothesis of human origins. 

The strongest genetic connection between Denisovans and any population of Anatomically Modern Men (and, I suppose, Women) has been found in New Guinea, principally in remote corners of the large island´s highlands. While Papuans are mostly of our own species, they must have mixed with Denisovans at some point in the very distant past. The French researchers raise some eyebrows over the presence of Denisovans at New Guinea. While most of the East Indies formed part of the Asian landmass during the Paleolithic, there was no land bridge between this area (“Sundaland”) and ancient Australia-New Guinea (“Sahul”). How did the Denisovans cross the sea?

What a remarkably silly question! Here is the obvious answer: they built rafts. Or even small boats. There, I solved the question for you. The question is either based on the idea that Stone Age peoples must have been “primitive”, or that pre-sapiens humans weren´t particularly sapient, and hence somehow couldn´t have done it. In reality, it´s clearly the other way around: they could and they did. That the Denisovans later may have lost that knowledge, becoming forever marooned in the New Guinea highlands with a bunch of cannibals of the more sapient persuasion, doesn´t disprove this. Even Stone Age cultures may have experienced cycles of rise and fall, the rise in this case being the phase of exploration. One might even speculate that the *fall* of some Denisovan land culture could have pushed a particularly clever remnant onto a journey of exploration…

There is clearly a lot more to find out here. Not just about the robust and archaic Denisovans, but also about our own gracile and modern prejudices.  

Restoring the balance

Credit: Impawards

"Godzilla" is a 2014 US film in the so-called MonsterVerse franchise, which features the two "classical" monstrosities Godzilla (Gojira) and King Kong in various combinations. In this particular flick, the primordial stegosaurid Godzilla is awakened by a deep sea expedition, and the nuclear tests at Bikini Island were supposedly attempts to kill this monster! When this fails, the US government sets up the ultra-secret Project Monarch to study the bizarre creature. Just as well, since even more monstrosities are hiding beneath the Earth surface, including two MUTOs or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms! (Is somebody making fun of the UFO subculture, I wonder?) 

The MUTOs, who have an obvious family resemblance to the Devil himself, want to mate and breed some more abominable creatures, destroying a Japanese nuclear power plant, Honolulu and Las Vegas (sic) in the process, before descending on an unsuspecting San Fransisco. Luckily, Gojira turns out to be on our side (more or less), and in the chaos and mayhem following the MUTO mating ritual, the stegosaurid seems to be the only thing that stands between us and a mass extinction event of Homo freakin´ sapiens. Apparently, "the king of the monsters" is Mother Nature´s way of "restoring the balance", sorely upset by the rampage of the trysting gargoyles.

I was going to complain about the major plot holes (one of them involving an encased nuclear device), but after the botched COVID response in the real world, the illogical chaos in "Godzilla" doesn´t seem so unrealistic anymore, I mean, the film almost comes across as a documentary! Must be the first time I get *that* feeling when watching a film where more money was used for the special effects than for the script...

I already reviewed "Kong: Skull Island", but I haven´t seen the later films in this series, one of which apparently pits Gojira against the over-sized gorilla in some kind of ultimate fighting of the ages. 

And while it probably doesn´t mean anything at all, I do think it´s funny to see a sci fi production involving hideous creatures from the bowels of our own planet, rather than the (obviously unrealistic) space aliens who litter every other SF flick! 

Three stars? 

DELTACRON HAS ARRIVED ON PLANET EARTH

 

The Punisher, kort och gott

Ett lustigt TT-telegram.

Varför är västmedia mot denne man? Lägg märke till sista stycket! :D

Jag vet, jag vet, han har alltför goda förbindelser med Kina...

xxxxx

Duterte vill bli vicepresident 2022

Filippinernas frispråkige president Rodrigo Duterte har tackat ja till att bli regeringspartiet PDP-Labans kandidat till vicepresidentposten i valet nästa år, skriver partiet i ett uttalande, enligt nyhetsbyrån Reuters.

Att Duterte accepterar kandidaturen är ett uttryck för att han lyssnat på ”folkets rop”, enligt Karlo Nograles, vice ordförande i PDP-Laban.

Efter Dutertes tillträde 2016 har tusentals verkliga eller påstådda narkotikalangare dödats i olika insatser, som människorättsgrupper ofta har liknat vid rena avrättningar.

Presidenten har också gjort sig ovän med en lång rad världsledare, bland annat USA:s tidigare president Barack Obama, som han kallade en ”horunge” och påven, som han kallade ”dåre”. Kritiska EU-ledare har hotats med stryk, och tidigare i somras sade han sig vilja kasta vaccinovilliga i finkan.

– Du bestämmer: Vaccin, eller så kommer jag att låta fängsla dig, sade han då i ett tv-tal. (TT)

xxxxx

Kommunister för frihandel?

En intressant artikel om de geopolitiska intrigerna i Asien och Stilla Havs-området.

Översatt av Flammans redaktion. 

Frihandelsbomb i Sydostasien

Facebook: Front for Red China?

Not happy with the Maoists 

Facebook: Red Front Organization?

I didn´t know Mark Zuckerberg was running a Red front operation with connections to Maoist insurgents, but you learn new shit every day. 

The trouble with Tasaday

I´ve been fooled twice by the strange and wonderful tale of the Tasaday. As a teenager, I believed that the story was real. And later, I believed (like everyone else) that of course it was a crude hoax. The real story, alas, is much more complicated. But then, that´s to be expected, is it not?

The link above goes to a classical NOVA documentary about the Tasaday aired in 1993. The story, set on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, started already in 1971, when Philippine government official Manuel Elizalde “discovered” a mysterious tribal people living in the rainforest. Known as the Tasaday, the natives lived on a Stone Age level and were super-primitive, having no tools, virtually no clothing, no knowledge about horticulture or even hunting, no religion and no rituals. They picked frogs and crabs with their bare hands, lived in caves, and had extremely crude stone tools. (They *did* know how to make fire, though.) Above all, they had no contact with the outside world, despite living only a three hour walk from the nearest farming village. The Tasaday became an overnight sensation, being seen as a remnant of humanity´s deep Paleolithic past. Until 1986, when new reports from the area rather indicated that the whole thing was a monumental hoax, orchestrated by Elizalde, and that the “Stone Age natives” were really paid actors from the neighboring farm villages… (Elizalde had fled the Philippines when long-time President Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown by the democratic opposition, thereby making it possible for independent reporters to reach the Tasaday area without being chaperoned.)

There the matter could have ended…except that it didn´t. The NOVA documentary interviews several anthropologists who studied the Tasaday during the 1970´s, and they are unconvinced by the hoax argument. For instance, the Tasaday language is distinct from those of neighboring peoples, and has almost no foreign loan words, nor words relating to agriculture. How likely is it that the Tasaday (including the children) could have systematically excluded all such words from their everyday speech in order to bolster the hoax? They also seemed familiar with the caves (again, including the children), also strange if they were really house-dwellers from a farming community. The documentary reaches the conclusion that the Tasaday, in a sense, were both a hoax and the real thing. Many of the concrete statements about them in the international media were grossly exaggerated. Elizalde probably did use them for PR purposes. For instance, they *did* have hunting technology. On the other hand, the Tasaday really were a separate community, not simply paid actors playing out a part.

It seems that the Tasaday once were farmers, indeed, they may have belonged to the neighboring Manobo people. At some point during the 19^th century, the ancestors of the Tasaday took to the rain forest, perhaps in order to escape slave-raiders. Thus, they were not a Paleolithic remnant, but rather fugitives from a very modern calamity. After 200 years as hunters and gatherers, their language had inevitably changed to reflect their social transformation, and their isolation can best be described as a survival strategy. NOVA calls them “secondary primitives”. Their play-acting, but also their later statements that it was all a hoax, are probably also part of the same survival strategy. Today, the Tasaday are learning agriculture from their Manobo neighbors and attend Christian churches, while still feeling comfortable as semi-nude hunters and gatherers. In a sense, I suppose you could say they have retrieved their agency…

Link to an article by Thomas N Headland, also interviewed in the documentary.

Tasaday, a short summary