The background of an X star

 I took ASL when I was working at an institution for the mentally disabled, and there are some schools which specialize with these students, including the school in Rochester where my brother got his degree.in engineering.

ASL is not just used for the deaf but children with speech impediments (for example, those with Down's syndrome) can learn it more easily to communicate.

And although I have forgotten most of my signing, I still use it when a kid is noisy or afraid of me: I sign to them and they are intrigued.

But there are other ways to communicate, and so DataRepublican's mom has an X post about how they raised their daughter.

I posted the tweet but blogger ate it and didn't publish it even though it is still there in my html. So here is the address: Copy and paste: https://t.co/yqJuy5SqDV

 I should note that she lost her hearing from meningitis at age 2, so already had the template of her brain wired with speech, so this might have been easier for her to learn than a kid who never was able to hear.

they put signs up on objects then increased the signs to include vocabulary. So she could read then lip read and did learn to sign later in life.

The writer Walker Percy had a daughter born deaf and they used a similar method to teach her to communicate. Discussion about this HERE.

 The ASL community is like other minorities and support each other, and resent those who don't want to join them. But now with cochlear implants, the controverxy is getting sharper.

You might prefer to raise your child is in your deaf culture, but if you get cochlear implants, they no longer are in that culture. This article from an Australian news site discusses.

The mother of DataRepublican (small R) chose to integrate her child into the wide world because her family was a hearing family, and as I noted, she already had the developmental part of her brain wired for speech. Nevertheless, it was a struggle.

Update: Blogger is now allowing me to post the X link

https://t.co/yqJuy5SqDV

— MOMof DataRepublican (@data_republican) January 26, 2026

....

and if you don't know who DataRepublican(small r) is: Shame on you. I know her from X but her website is here.

Organs for sale

 

I am not sure if this is true, but it is well known that China uses organs from prisoners for transplant.

but don't feel superior: Canada is using organs from depressed people asking to be killed, and indeed even sending the organs into the USA to be transplanted.

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of course, this will encourage people to die instead of getting proper help

Indeed, we are already seeing propaganda films about how wonderful it is for folks to kill themselves to do this.

with all the high prices of treatment, and when proper experts might not be available for those in the inner city or in rural areas, how many people will easily be seduced to kill themselves to get proper pain relief, and not know that thee is treatment including proper pain relief for their disease.

Don't believe mme?? Scott Adams got pills to kill himself but admitted he was in pain (i.e. poor pain control by his doctors) and had was not given hormone blockers because he didn't want it, even though variations of this has been used to treat prostate cancer since the 1940s. However, after he posted about this, some people came to his aid and got him decent treatment. True, it only prolonged his life for six months, but according to his vlog, when he died he was pain free and able to vlog until the day before he died.

But how many others never got proper treatment?

the irony is that minorities often refuse to sign living wills, or sign up as donors on their drivers license, because they fear that the (white or foreign) doctors will just let them die.

I would like to say this is paranoia, and that things like the Tuskeegee experiment, where those with syphilis were divided into two groups, and some were never treated (I had one of these patients as a medical student: He had a huge Aortic aneurism, which 40 years ago was not operable). \

And it's not just in Black patients:  In the 1950s some Red Lake Indians were not treated for impetigo despite the danger of acute glomerulonephritis in a previous epidemic, just to see what would happen 

And then there was the triage of babies with Meninomyelocoel, where if you don't meet a criteria that included poverty/education, you didn't get treatment: A few years later, a black doctor checked it out and found out that it meant most of the patients not offered life saving treatment were black.

And the case of La Diabla, got little publicity in the USA:

Mexican authorities arrested Martha Alicia Mendez Aguilar, “La Diabla,” in Juarez last month for allegedly presiding over an infant smuggling and organ harvesting operation. Aguilar, reportedly a leading member of the Jalisco Nuevo Genaracion cartel, would capture poor, pregnant mothers and force them to get a C-section before murdering them. The women’s organs were harvested and sold. Their babies were trafficked into the United States for between $13,000 and $14,000 each.

 one would think I could find a video about this explosive story but all I could find was this, where it is meneioned near the end of a short report

and don't get me into the part about buying organs from poor people, something that is illegal here in the Philippines but alas happens.

family news

my daughter on law is wearing the yellow dress

 She teaches organic farming and runs a co-op of farmers with government sponsorshop for outreach projects

the three dimensional chess board in Greenland

 Hannibal is often portrayed as the greatest general in history. But do you know how he was defeated? 

By going behind him to destroy his supplies and reinforcement, so for 15 years all he could do is terrorize the locals in Italy wandering around stealing their food etc.

And he was finally stopped when Scipio Africanus invaded North Africa.  . And no, those terrible elephants which was their superweapon, didn''t work. (or maybe not).

so why am I pointing this out?

Because China is weaponizing against a weak Europe (and Canada) in many ways: 

and Trumpieboy is hitting them at their periphery so they can't exploit Latin America (stopping China from taking over Venezuelan oil and rare earth metals, and giving a headsup to other countries where there is already resentment against Chinese tactics of lending them aid and then taking over the projects when the loans are not repaid: i.e. exploitation worse than the Yankees, sort of like better the devil you know than the devil you don't know).

and now by publicizing the importance of Greenland, Trump is giving a headsup about China trying to use their economic stranglehold by usual means to take over that land's wealth (build stuff by importing their own workforce, and then take over the ports/resources when the country can't pay them back).

This is the geostrategy behind Trumpiboy's moves.

I may not like it, but we see how weakness shown by PNoy and Obama allowed China to take over the West Philippine sea, build and weaponize shoals into artificial islands which have the ability to block shipping and the internet that goes through this area.

Someone said Trump plays three dimensional chess, a term that refers to the game popularized by StarTrek and as Wikipedia notes it that term is now used to describe geopolitical moves:

The expression "three-dimensional chess" is sometimes used as a colloquial metaphor to describe complex, dynamic systems with many competing entities and interests, including politics, diplomacy and warfare. To describe an individual as "playing three-dimensional chess" implies a higher-order understanding and mastery of the system beyond the comprehension of their peers or ordinary observers, who are implied to be playing "regular chess"

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Factoid of the day

 There are 1100 Filipino OFW in Greenland, the largest number of outsiders after Denmark.

And although the Philippines is keeping an eye on them, there are no plans to help them leave.

it's a Filipino story

......https://youtu.be/2UkTBuEx-ek?si=Zfxq84gCGm9VMAD7

History of cats

scientists  are finding wild cats that lived near humans and ate vermin were found in a lot of the world, but these cats were never really domesticated: Most domesticated cats originated in North Africa. and spread with trade etc...even Chinese cats came via the Silk Road.

,,,,,

here is a Smithsonian article 

summary: local small cats did live with farmers before then but were not domesticated but essentially wild cats who came to eat vermin. But then the domesticated (i.e friendly) cats arrived and spread thanks to the Romans etc.: and this wasn't just true in Europe, but also in Asia:

using genetic testing, researchers have discovered that pet cats likely arrived in China around 600 C.E.—over 1,500 years after their introduction to Europe. According to a study recently published on the preprint server bioRxiv, cats were one of the many assets that traveled east on the famous Silk Road, the lengthy trading network that connected Asia with Europe between the second century B.C.E. and the 15th century C.E.

another Smithsonian article here:

An analysis revealed that the cats from before 200 B.C.E. were wildcats, and that their domestic counterparts didn’t reach Europe until about 2,000 years ago. Moreover, these feline friends came from North Africa, not east of the Mediterranean....

the other new study traced the history of domestic cats in China, differentiating them from wildcats there. The team studied 22 feline bones from 14 archeological sites in China spanning about 5,000 years. The analysis revealed that although wild leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis) lived among humans for around 3,500 years, they were a “clear example of a ‘failed domestication,’ 

in Japan, of course, cats are popular: Hello Kitty for example in today's world. and cats are mentioned in books from 900/1000 AD: They are mentioned in both Tale of Genji (where a guy steals the cat from a married girl he loves so he can feel a connection with her) and in the Pillow Book,  where the local watchdog attacks the emperor's cat and the dog is (almost) beaten to death to punish it.

Usually cats are a symbol of welcoming home, and this smiling cat that waves at you is also seen in the Philippines as a decoration

but then there are stories of the evil side of cats:

here in our area of the Philippines, we have feral cats who wander into our business compound to catch mice/lizards and eat what the cook leaves out for them. About four years ago, all the cats in our area disappeared (?infection) but now they have come back. 

The bad news: Our dogs kill cats. The cats that lived here when they were puppies were left alone but they will try to kill any new cat that wanders into our home. So the cats tend to stay in the storage and workshop areas, not in our house any more.

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update: according to AI: Maine coon cats and Norwegian forest cats are genetically related to the smaller domesticated cat we all know and love but developed their traits due to harsh conditions

Remembering slide rules

and who invented it?

Parody time

 Hollywood seems to be rewriting all the classics, so some nerds have done it for them:

some AI suggestions for remaking LOTR:

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...

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the book was originally sold to Hollywood, but they wanted to rewrite the whole book, so luckily it didn't get filmed. But if it had been made here is an AI video of how it might have been casted:

Rand Paul discusses covid

 

posted for later listening on my tablet.

Rand Paul is a dangerous guy: He is a doctor and honest and won't obey the propaganda of either side.

In our prayers