Thursday, March 21, 2019

Facebook & Twitter Notes, March 21, 2019


“Bee-hunting remains a dangerous profession, sometimes you come across a snake coming out of a hole and bees can also sting you in the face,” he says.
A bee hunter for 15 years, the muscular man learnt the skill from his father who worked in this field for decades. “He taught me this old tradition to perpetuate it,” he explains. In spite of teaching his son how to collect wild honey, Kathery says that this ancient tradition will one day "completely disappear".
Less affected by the rampant modernisation of lifestyles, the southern governorate of Dhofar is nevertheless no longer a haven for bee hunters. “In 1997, those mountains were blessed with honey and I collected 42 bottles from a single place. Now, I harvest no more than two bottles a month."
In the crowded alleys of the Central Market of Salalah, Dhofar’s capital city, Ahmad Jabali sells honey collected from the mountain at a hefty $260 for one bottle. The natural liquid is served with food but also used for its therapeutic powers. 

From Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine.

Indeed, medicinal importance of honey has been documented in the world's oldest medical literatures, and since the ancient times, it has been known to possess antimicrobial property as well as wound-healing activity. The healing property of honey is due to the fact that it offers antibacterial activity, maintains a moist wound condition, and its high viscosity helps to provide a protective barrier to prevent infection. Its immunomodulatory property is relevant to wound repair too. The antimicrobial activity in most honeys is due to the enzymatic production of hydrogen peroxide. However, another kind of honey, called non-peroxide honey (viz., manuka honey), displays significant antibacterial effects even when the hydrogen peroxide activity is blocked. Its mechanism may be related to the low pH level of honey and its high sugar content (high osmolarity) that is enough to hinder the growth of microbes. The medical grade honeys have potent in vitro bactericidal activity against antibiotic-resistant bacteria causing several life-threatening infections to humans. But, there is a large variation in the antimicrobial activity of some natural honeys, which is due to spatial and temporal variation in sources of nectar. Thus, identification and characterization of the active principle(s) may provide valuable information on the quality and possible therapeutic potential of honeys (against several health disorders of humans), and hence we discussed the medicinal property of honeys with emphasis on their antibacterial activities.

Brian Schatz is the Senator from Hawaii appointed to succeed Senator Inouye in 2012.

Hard to know which is more durably ignorant, the anti-vax crowd or Trump's core supporters.




Joseph Dana's op-ed is a thumbnail sketch of the impasse of progress toward a two-state goal.

The National, founded in 2008, is an English-language daily in UAE.

As mainstream candidates such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu make alliances with extremist parties, it is clear that Israel’s nationalist shift is all but complete. Openly racist discourse about Palestinians is now the norm in political debates.
Meanwhile, the ascent of politicians such as Naftali Bennett has shown Israelis and the world that any commitment to peace and the temporary nature of the occupation was a smokescreen.
These politicians have made it clear that they intend to hold on to the West Bank and make no attempt to conceal their prejudice and hostility towards Palestinians.

A Facebook friend posted a link to a good NY Times op-ed by Bret Stephens focused on Hamas' military dictatorship in Gaza.
Together with a link to Wikipedia's Palestinian Diaspora I posted this screencap & comment:


Good analysis as far as it goes. Hamas is a poster child for despicable oppressive military dictatorships.Meantime, Israel's divide-and-conquer strategy continues to effectively keep Palestinians from forming a state.They are not only split apart in the occupied territories, but scattered all over the world as well.

China's electric busses caught my eye. They are a glimpse of the future, still in the opening stages.

From the Guardian:
Meanwhile, cities such as London and New York are accelerating their drive towards electric buses. London plans to make all single-decker buses emission-free by 2020, and all double-deckers hybrid by 2019. New York plans to make its bus fleet all-electric by 2040.



Steve Inskeep tweets "No matter how much I learn about slavery, new details of its depravity shock me all over again. This was the case with Andrew Delbanco's book. It circulates amid the debate over reparations."



Delbanco's interview with Terry Gross last November (37 minutes) is a powerful lesson in our loss of civility. (Transcript at this link, or listen below.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson said at one point, no one tastes blood in the treats - blood in the treats. New Englanders didn't think about the fact that they might have had personal investments in the State Street Bank or some other bank that was making indispensable loans to plantation owners. They didn't think very hard about the fact that the Industrial Revolution that started to pick up steam in Massachusetts in the 1820s and 1830s where textile mills were at the center of that activity, that those textile mills were weaving slave-grown cotton into cloth. They didn't think about the clothes they were wearing on their own backs.
People, I think - you know, how many of us are really willing to think hard about where the comforts and pleasures and the conveniences of life that we take for granted, where they actually come from? What kind of laborers are producing these things for us, under what conditions? So again, I think it's easy to sit in judgment on people in the past and say, well, they should have thought about it; they should have realized that slavery was as much their problem as it was that of the slave owners. But I'm not sure we're in a position to make that moral judgment.
In any case, what the fugitive slave law did - Emerson said it again. He said it was like a sheet of lightning at midnight. Another phrase of his that I like very much - it was a university to the people. It taught the fact that there was an intricate web of connection between the slave owners of the South and the industrialists and indeed the citizens of the North.


And finally, I posted this little message in the hope that some of my Christian friends might connect the dots. It breaks my heart (and pisses me off) that many otherwise good people have been led to believe that President Trump is somehow an incarnation of a man with eschatological significance. 
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