abqtommy
abqtommy's JournalFrom AlJazeera In Pictures: Kenya's elephants face new threat
This text-heavy gallery is worth reading just to see the magnificent photos.
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/3/18/from-poaching-to-avocados-kenyas-elephants-face-new-threat
Yesterday I posted some information about the current problems in Myanmar and
background information that helps us understand that situation. You can find that here:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215233061
In that op I noted that any mention of the religious component of this ongoing problem
was missing and I said I'd provide that. Here it is.
Back in 2017 I first took an interest in what turned out to become called Genocide against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The majority religion in Myanmar is Buddhist and was further identified as Buddhist Nationalists. Since I know that nationalism is correctly identified as fascism I began to investigate and found the following:
Buddhism is generally classified as having two major divisions and out of those divisions come three major Buddhist sects. Of these three, the sect identified as Theravada is the Nationalist Buddhist sect in the majority in Myanmar and other areas of Southeast Asia, including Sri Lanka. See this article and handy color chart of the major world locations of the various Buddhist sects:
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-fscj-worldreligions/chapter/three-schools-of-buddhism/
Other links:
Buddhist Inspired Genocide from Berkley Forum in 2017
https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/buddhist-inspired-genocide
From Wikipedia : "The persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar dates back to the 1970s. Since then, the Rohingya people have been persecuted on a regular basis by the government and nationalist Buddhists."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
I read a news report just yesterday about ongoing plans in Sri Lanka to further penalize
their Muslim population.
Why does this matter to me? I can draw a straight line between the White Evangelicals here in the U.S. who support the fascism of our reTHUGS to the White Fascists in
Europe then on to these fascist religionists in Southeast Asia and even in Africa but that's another op. Note: The fascists in Southeast Asia and Africa are not white but every bit as dangerous.
I support all peoples who deserve a better life and who are working to attain that.
Weather Report In Albuquerque: At 7PM MDT It. Is. Snowing.
It's not cold enough for it to collect on the ground but it keeps coming down. We can
always use the moisture. It's not even collecting on our car much yet. That may change
as it gets colder tonight.
Old Guy says: I remember that on the First of April in 1996 it had been warm enough
in Upper Michigan for the large snow piles to start melting off and then there was a
blizzard! Of course people up there are disappointed if there isn't ever an accumulated
winter snowfall of 20 feet... And of course I had to walk to school and home again uphill both ways!
From The Guardian: Haircuts, cherry blossom and a sandstorm: Monday's best photos
At last here's a break from the serious news of the day. (Well, mostly.) Enjoy and breathe
deep!
https://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2021/mar/15/haircuts-cherry-blossom-and-a-sandstorm-mondays-best-photos
FromThe BBC: Myanmar coup: What protesters can learn from the '1988 generation'
This article gives some important perspective to the present problems in Myanmar.
However, no mention is made of the primary influence of the Buddhist Nationalists
that I learned of during the recent genocide that has driven the Rohingya Muslims in
Myanamar into Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Malaysia as refugees. I'll be writing about that (again) in a separate op.
from this article:
'Student activists lead a movement to bring an end to a widely-hated military government in Myanmar. It grows into a nationwide uprising, a general strike, which is met with savage brutality by the armed forces. 2021? Or 1988?
The 1988 uprising remains one of the defining moments of Myanmar's modern history. A regime which had used extreme levels of violence to hold onto power, suddenly found itself facing massive protests over its calamitous mishandling of the economy.
By 1988 Burma, as the South East Asian nation was then known, had been ruled for 26 years by the secretive and superstitious General Ne Win, who seized power in a coup in 1962. He was commander of the armed forces - known as the Tatmadaw - which had been fighting insurgencies in several parts of Burma since independence in 1948, and viewed civilians as incapable of holding the country together.
General Ne Win cut Burma off from the outside world, refusing to take sides in the Cold War divisions then afflicting Asia. Instead he implemented an eccentric one-party system under his Burma Socialist Programme Party, in which the army played a dominant role, and led to Burma becoming one of the world's poorest countries.'
much more text and photos at link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56331307
From The BBC: Rare ancient scroll found in Israel Cave of Horror
I always have an interest in things like this. Not only does it increase our knowledge and
understanding of what our ancestors did, it also shows us that technology may change
but people stay pretty much the same.
from article:
'Fragments of a Biblical scroll and other relics have been found in what officials call an "historic discovery" in desert caves in Israel.
The dozens of pieces of parchment were written in Greek, with just the name of God appearing in Hebrew.
The scroll is believed to have belonged to Jewish rebels who fled to the hills following a failed revolt against Roman rule in the 2nd Century.
They were found during an operation to prevent caves in the area being looted.'
much more text and photos at link:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56405090
Update concerning my ongoing experience with my WIN 7 computer...
I do this as a thank-you to all the help I've gotten from computer people here and also
hope that someone might be able to benefit from my experience. This is a little long
but it is original writing...
So I keep my WIN 7 machine in my bedroom where I also run a laptop running Vista
as backups. I regularly fire them both up to make sure things are working. I noticed
that the WIN7 unit had begun showing the Blue Screen of Catastrophic Failure
whenever I used it to access the internet, with text that said I had a disk failure. I tried to get into the 'set-up' or 'safe' modes and that wasn't working. I also noticed that I saw the words 'Keyboard Failure' a few times.
It only took me about 5 minutes to locate a new keyboard and swap that in and lo, soon
I was In Safe Mode With Command Prompt. After reviewing information on my WIN 10
machine I entered the command prompt "chkdsk C: /F /X /R" (Without the quotation marks and yes, there's a space before each / and a space before the C.) This command prompt was supposed to result in the analysis of the failure and repair of my disk. It took quite a while to run and when it was done I did a restart by entering "shutdown /r" (with a space before the /) and it restarted.
When I brought the machine back up and online what did I see but the Blue Screen Of Catastrophic Shutdown. But this time there was no disk warning. What I had instead was a suggestion to check the BIOS with a few settings that were recommended to check. So I got into the BIOS and never did find the recommended settings but did find one setting that was disabled and since the accompanying text said it should be enabled I did just that. So I got out and did another restart.
I went through start-up again and got online. I got one screen flicker and a little
box notice that said "Windows has recovered from an unexpected problem" and that
went away and I was up and running with no Blue Screen.
This happened several weeks ago and every week I fire up the WIN 7 unit and it just keeps chugging along. This makes me very happy, as you can imagine.
I keep getting update notices every time I turn on this unit. Remember that Microsoft was going to end support for WIN 7 over a year ago but that hasn't happened yet. I'm
not complaining but I do wonder why.
They all lived happily ever after. The End
Here's list of all the languages available for translator support here in New Mexico.
This information comes with every letter from a State or Medical agency and shows a
highly developed program of inclusivity as opposed to someone who tells anyone speaking a language other than English to "go back to where you came from".
We'll get English and Spanish out of the way first since they're both Official Languages here in New Mexico. Any letter we get here from a state or medical agency comes in both
languages.
Besides that, you can get translator support if any of the following is your first language:
Navajo, Vietnamese, German, Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Tagalog-Filipino, Japanese,
French, Italian, Russian, Hindi, Farsi and Thai.
I coulda made it prettier but I just went down the list as it's printed on the paperwork that
I get. Besides, it's been a long day. But isn't that inclusive? It makes me wanna sing Kumbaya, for sure!
From The Guardian: 'Doctor Peyo': the horse comforting cancer patients in Calais - in pictures
This is very special and moving, at least to me. Whaddya think?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/gallery/2021/mar/12/doctor-peyo-the-horse-comforting-cancer-patients-in-calais-in-pictures
From The Guardian: Scientists may have solved ancient mystery of 'first computer'
I love this stuff. Just goes to show that everything old is new again!
NOTE: UCL in the article refers to University College London
From article:
From the moment it was discovered more than a century ago, scholars have puzzled over the Antikythera mechanism, a remarkable and baffling astronomical calculator that survives from the ancient world.
The hand-powered, 2,000-year-old device displayed the motion of the universe, predicting the movement of the five known planets, the phases of the moon and the solar and lunar eclipses. But quite how it achieved such impressive feats has proved fiendishly hard to untangle.
Now researchers at UCL believe they have solved the mystery – at least in part – and have set about reconstructing the device, gearwheels and all, to test whether their proposal works. If they can build a replica with modern machinery, they aim to do the same with techniques from antiquity.
“We believe that our reconstruction fits all the evidence that scientists have gleaned from the extant remains to date,” said Adam Wojcik, a materials scientist at UCL. While other scholars have made reconstructions in the past, the fact that two-thirds of the mechanism are missing has made it hard to know for sure how it worked.
Much more text and photos at link:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/12/scientists-move-closer-to-solving-mystery-of-antikythera-mechanism
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