Not what you want to read or hear; Who chooses which half?

Dear Gentle Reader,

"Even if China lost half its population, the country would suffer no great loss. We could produce more people."

Speech given by Chairman Mao at the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties (18 November 1957)

What would it look like if a country lost half of its population?

Who chooses which half?

Tschuess,

Chris

A light on the future? Or the past? a.k.a. The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of...

Dear Gentle Reader,

"The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of. China has many people. They cannot be bombed out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too. The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of."

Reported Minutes of a Conversation between Chairman Mao, of China, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, of India, during Prime Minister Nehru's visit to Beijing (23 October 1954)

...The power of scale...

...and a callous heart...

I would hope that things have changed...

Tschuess,

Chris

Pictures of Body Bags and the Tibetan Connection

Dear Gentle Reader,

Today is a follow-up to the post on germ warfare and the bags of diseases, the body bag bombs, that the Mongols used. 

Nobody asked, but I am guessing somebody out there wants to ask what those body bags looked like.

Your scribe comes prepared because Monday's post relates to things that your heroine and scribe learned while researching our trip to Tibet last year.

The image at that start of Monday's post, and today's post, is a Tibetan Buddhist Bag of Diseases, one of the five weapons of Sri Devi as she fights evil and the opponents of Buddhism.  

Guess why that guy is tied in a knot... 

Guess what his (now) bag-like shape contains... 

And you thought all Buddhists were gentle...

So don't forget to put money in that bowl when you pass a saffron-robed monk or a nun in grey... 

But wait, why do the Mongols have anything to do with Tibet? Besides the fact that their territories were alongside each other.  

And besides the fact that both, and what became Modern China, would control or greatly affect each other, as relative power waxed or waned in the region.  

And besides the fact that the Dalai Lama's position and title was allegedly granted to the first Dalai Lama by a Mongolian.  

Kublai Khan had converted to Buddhism to have a universal religion to bind Tibet, Mongolia, and China.  In 1578 a descendant of Kublai Khan, Altan Khan, an aggressor against China, proclaimed a Tibetan Lama to be "Dalai" (Ocean in Mongolian, symbolizing supreme leader and the Dalai Lama has since been linked with supreme secular power in Tibet).  In return, the Tibetan Lama proclaimed Altan Khan to be the reincarnation of Kublai Khan (Ghengis Khan's grandson).

OK, so that is the connection, and that is why we found depicitions of body bags in Tibet.  

Body bags were used by Sri Devi to combat enemies of Buddhism and Buddhist concepts. While Sri Devi, as a mythological figure, used them figuratively I am guessing that earlier Tibetans, like the Mongolians, used them literally. 

If you enjoyed Monday's and today's posts, you could, as always, mention them to your friends; make them viral...

With smiles from across the water, and a raised, chocolate-covered mango margarita...

Tschuess,

Chris, Regina, and Pommes with a paw covering his mouth

Germ warfare; the Mongols say hello

Hello Gentle Reader,  

...Hmm....  Maybe not so gentle.

Some of you liked the post about the Black Death...

...Well, let me follow that post with a family-friendly post on germ warfare.

...First, an apparently stream-of-consciousness diversion.  

There is a human genetic anomaly called Down Syndrome. It is named after the British Doctor, Dr. John Langdon Down, who fully described the disorder in 1866. Later, in 1959, France's Dr. Jérôme Lejeune showed that people with Down Syndrome all had an extra (partial) copy of the twenty-first chromosome.

Of course Lejeune's recognition of the chromosomal nature of the disorder did not change the name of the disorder as characterized by Dr. Down. Similarly, Dr. Down's categorization of the syndrome did not create or change a well known human condition.

I suppose that line of thought could lead us to the question of what is in a name...

In English, today, we talk about people who have Down Syndrome as being mentally challenged.  

When your humble scribe was in high school the descriptive phrase for this condition was mentally disabled. When your scribe was at grade school the descriptive phrase was mentally retarded. 

Going back much further, the descriptive phrase in my grandmother's life was mongolism. Similarly, people who had mongolism were called Mongoloids. 

Finally, older medical texts that your scribe used to use also referred to Mongolism...  

...But I always thought that Mongols were people from Mongolia, like the Great Genghis Khan? Rapacious, yes, but so was Alexander the Great. So why were Mongols singled out in such a way in European history? 

This is where the apparent diversion cease to be a diversion.

In 1346 the Mongols were on one of their raids of conquest and began besieging the port city of Kaffa. Kaffa lies on the Black Sea (Kaffa is now Feodosiya (zoom out to see it better on the map) in the Ukraine's Crimea). 

(Note, by raid, your scribe means a monumental horde of pillage and loot hungry calvarymen.)

The Mongols were fast attackers, horsemen of the steppes. They were not so keen on sieges. Mongol warriors liked to end sieges as quickly as possible.

The Plague was endemic in Mongolia and the higher steppes. In combination with other diseases such as anthrax, dropsy, leprosy, cholera, or dysentery, the Plague was used as a potent weapon by the Mongols.  

The Mongols would gather the corpses of people who had died of these horrific diseases. The corpses would be opened and the innards of the corpses would be scooped out. The scooped out remains would then be mixed up and combined to make a rather pungent and nasty concoction.  

This concoction would then be poured back into the original corpses which were then individually resealed by being sewn and tied up forming individual proto-bodybags; lets call the resulting invention a bag of diseases.

These bags of diseases would either be dropped into local water sources or hurled directly into cities which the Mongols were besieging.  

These bags of diseases were used as germ warfare siege engines and they would dramatically speed up the process of siege conquest.

While besieging the city of Kaffa the Mongols had an outbreak of the plague in their own ranks. The Mongols, of course, made some body bags and hurled these bags of diseases into Kaffa. These bags, as usual, exploded and spattered on impact; the besieged became quite sick.  

Who were the besieged? Kaffites? Kaffians? How do you call citizens of Kaffa? Were there citizens of Kaffa?

Well, at the time, denizens of Kaffa were subject to Genoa.

Genoa was, then, a major trading, naval power in continuous conflict with Venice, the other major naval power in the West. 

Genoa controlled the Black Sea, amongst other areas, and Kaffa was a Genoese trading settlement/fortress.

So what did you call a denizen of Kaffa when the Mongols started lobbing bags of death into the city?

You called them dead, or soon to be dead. 

Unless they were Genoese citizens. Then you called them loudly, waving money in your hands, because they were fleeing Death--who was apparently stalking Kaffa with his scythe in hand.

Genoese citizenship did not provide immunity to the effects of the bags of disease, but it did provide a way out of the city.

Genoese merchants and militamen, in Kaffa, fled the diseases unleashed by the Mongols. 

Well, the merchants thought they had escaped Death, and the mysterious diseases of Kaffa, as they took off in trading and war galleys.  

In the Genoese merchants' flight they landed at various ports in Southern Europe to take on supplies... and, as normal, they off loaded some trading goods, and, incidentally and inevitably, they offloaded some rats (rats were a harmless enought irritant, as perceived at the time, and all ships had them).  

No one wanted rats on a ship, they ate and fouled everything, but they seemed to be endemic to ships. 

In 1346 no one had any clue how the Plague was transmitted. We are talking about a time long before the concept of germ theory, so there was no concern or awareness as to what the merchants and naval men were inadvertently offloading when rats (and rat fleas) made their way onto each deck at each port of call. 

Of course, as the Swiss-cum-French Dr. Yersin discovered in Hong Kong in 1894, rats could spread the Plague. Japan's Dr. Masanori Ogata subsequently showed that fleas had the same bacterial infection as the rats. 

Finally, in 1897, the Frenchman, Dr. Paul-Louis Simond, dispatched by the Pasteur Institute (Institut Pasteur) to India to follow-up on Dr. Yersin's research, showed that rat fleas, Xenopsylla cheopis, were the vector transmitting the Plague bacteria from rats to people.

None of this was known in 1346-1347 in Europe, but people in the port towns visited by the fleeing Genoese recognized that the stories of death told by the Genoese merchants, sailors, and military men were terrifyingly followed by similar deaths after the trading fleets left.

These vessels fleeing Kaffa, and Kaffa's diseases, infected Europe with the Black Death via their ship rats and the fleas on those rats. 

But the Genoese were not blamed for the resulting carnage, The Black Death, that decimated Europe. 

No, the Genoese were not blamed; the Mongols were blamed.

The Mongols, after all, had used abominable bags of disease as weapons of war.

As the Plague was first brought to Europe, at least in the public's consciousness, by Mongols who lobbed putrefying corpses over the walls of Kaffa, gentle Readers (and possibly throughly appalled Readers), this is why your humble scribe thinks that there has been a link between Mongols and things that we fear striking but cannot explain. Such as Mongolism.

Tschuess,

Chris, Regina, and Pommes

PS. Again, to see the genesis of this post was, read here...

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb

Dear Gentle Reader,

Their forefathers on their family tree can be traced, through the rocks, back 354 million years.

They have been with mankind for all our short time on this planet.

They have co-existed with us and some claim they will outlive us.

Ancient Romans have at least this much in common with us... ...Ancient Romans would stamp them out in their kitchens, in their living rooms, and when they tried to climb their reclining couches.

(You have to really stamp hard to kill these beasties.)

Blatt. Blatt. BLATT!

The stomping would continue, and it is from that onomatopoeic word, "blatt", that your humble scribe, whose literary origins predate the Romans by a few thousand years, supposes that the name of these beasties flows.

They were called blatta in Latin from which that great organizing Swede Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) gave them the Order Blattodea, the Family Blattidae, and the Genus Blatta.

Blatt. Blatt. BLATT!

I call them a nuisance.

BLATT.

Others call them cockroaches.

These puppies can be 3 cm long, which is longer than an inch, and the males can fly up to 2 meters (6 feet); you should have seen how surprised our first cat, in Taiwan, was when the cockroach he was playing with flew away. Chips literally fell backwards onto his bum in astonishment.

In Taiwan, when I moved to what became my last apartment there, I was delighted to have no cockroaches in my dream apartment.

The apartment was the top two stories of the building plus the roof top, front and back, with an internal, spiral cast-iron staircase. The front patio looked onto the river.

On moving day I was at the apartment to sign the lease so that I could take possession and move my belongings into the apartment.

I called a Belgian friend of mine who was helping co-ordinate the moving trucks. As a throw-away aside, he asked me what I had done to kill the cockroaches and to bring the population under control before I moved in.

"There are no cockroaches!" I said "It's a perfect apartment!"

My friend laughed.

He laughed a full belly laugh.

Then he laughed the short, sharp laugh of he who knows better.

"You have cockroaches." he told me authoritatively, "Everyone does."

"Go into the guest bathroom on the main floor" he said "and turn the lights out. Sit still for two minutes and then call me back."

"Try it in the kitchen, too." he added as a helpful afterthought.

I didn't last 30 seconds. I could hear them everywhere. When I put the light on, I saw them scurrying into the cracks. Yeucch. It was worse in the kitchen. When I looked under the sink and looked up, I could see a swarming mass.

This was not good.

This was bad.

This was not the way it was supposed to be.

I phoned my friend up to confess his superiority and to ask for advice.

With the tone of one who knows best he told me to go round the corner and find a little general sell-all store and to get a can of Bayer cockroach killer spray. I think it was called Baygon. "Maybe get a couple" he told me "because you have a pretty big place".

I followed his advice. I found a store, they had six cans, and I bought them all because I had a really big place.

I started spraying under the sink and cockroaches started forming a ball in the air. It was like they were coalescing into existence from the void; I have no idea where these cockroaches were coming from.

This was a horror film moment. It was like Beelzebub had been unleashed, which makes sense as that demon, called the Lord of Flies, is more accurately translated as Lord of Things that Fly.

I went up to the roof and collected 18 bricks from a stack on the patio.

I brought the bricks downstairs, setting two upright, alongside each other, in six rooms and I then put a can of anti-roach spray between the two upright bricks in each room.

Breaking the head off of each can of Baygon, I would stand it between the two upright bricks. Laying the third brick across the standing bricks, depressing the can of Baygon's release valve, I had made a bomb.

I had made my own roach bomb and, with the mist burning my eyes and throat, I would move to the next room to repeat the process.

Six bombs later I exited the apartment, jumped on my motorcycle, and went to the other side of town to meet up with my friend and the movers.

After everything was packed we all took off for my new apartment. I sped ahead by motor bike to open the windows and to air out the apartment for a half hour before everyone else arrived.

I also stopped to pick up a broom, a dustpan, and some plastic bags at the general sell-all store around the corner from my house to clean up the ball of cockroaches that had been forming in the kitchen when I left.

My first inkling that there might be trouble came from the fact that all the neighbours seemed to be out of their homes on the street.

There also seemed to be a shimmering in the air, five stories below my apartment, where the stairwell opened onto the street.

As I walked towards the open apartment door three things made themselves clear to me.

First, my new neighbours were angry; they started yelling at me as they recognized that I was the new tenant.

Second, the air tasted metallic and green. No, I have no idea why it tasted green, but that is what I recall.

Third, I realized that my ad hoc roach bomb was pretty powerful. There was a trail of dead cockroaches down the stairs.

As I stood there, taking in the devastation, a cockroach on the street passed by the open door leading to the apartment's stairwell...

...The cockroach on the street skittered quickly, at normal cockroach speed, stopped, wobbled, and fell over, feet up, and still.

Hmm.

This might not be so good.

I moved to the side of the shimmering, metallic air, took a quick breath, and ran up four flights of stairs, to my new apartment.

I went all the way to the top floor where the patio and my second level was, unlocked and propped open the door to my apartment, opened all the windows on the top floor of my apartment, and returned outside to the patio for more fresh air.

Venturing inside again I went to the first level, hit the lights, and stared.

The floor was littered with corpses.

I had wrought cockroach genocide. I could feel my eyes burning. Shame? No, just that metallic, green tasting air.

Opening the windows, I was grateful that there was a stiff breeze. The shimmering air started to disperse.

The air still tasted metallic, but not green as I swept up the detritus of the infestation from the stairwell and the apartment. I counted this as an improvement as I filled bags with dead cockroaches and shuddered as I scooped their bodies into the bags.

I thought about the opinion held by some that cockroaches could survive the aftermath of a nuclear blast; well, they obviously couldn't survive my roach bomb.

About half an hour later I was finished, short of breath, and I waited on the roof. I was a bit too self-conscious to wait downstairs where all the neighbours were still congregated, looking up at me, and talking.

I thought that the worst was over.

Then the movers showed up.

By now, I had visited numerous factories throughout Asia for work, including a couple dozen in Taiwan. I knew the conditions that workers work in. I fancy that I was one of the pioneers of social audits which I conducted on behalf of some of my clients.

When the movers exited their trucks they talked to the neighbours. The movers smelled the metallic green air and decided that they were not moving things into my apartment. They considered my apartment toxic and dangerous.

At this pronouncement I knew there was trouble because Taiwanese workers routinely worked in what I considered very toxic surroundings.

After 45 minutes of arguing, the movers agreed to move my goods upstairs, onto the back patio, under the back roof.

But these workers refused to set foot inside the apartment.

They tried to avoid breathing in the stairwell.

My Belgian friend thought I shouldn't have used six cans ("SIX cans? Are you crazy? I don't even know if that stuff is legal anywhere else but here! Leave your stuff outside overnight. It will be covered from the rain and the fumes will keep the cockroaches away!" said my friend, and he was right).

That night I slept in a hotel instead of my apartment. I woke bleeding and stayed away from my apartment for two more days.

When I returned there were no live cockroaches in my apartment, although there were a few new dead ones on the patio... Great.

I decided to chemically wash the apparently strong toxins out of my apartment. Remembering organic chemistry courses and laboratory classes from undergraduate studies, I washed my apartment with water, then with bleach, with water again, and then with a weak acid. For my weak acid I used crates of Japanese rice vinegar that were deeply discounted at a grocery.

(The owners of the nearby grocery must have thought a crazy western sushi maker (Japanese rice vinegar makes the rice sticky to make sushi) with obsessive compulsive cleaning tendencies (the bleach) had moved into their neighborhood.)

I would throw buckets of the various cleaning solutions onto the walls and then swab with a mop. Backing up to throw water onto one wall in the main hallway, I recoiled violently.

I had gone through the opposing wall that I had wet down previously. I did not go far through the wet wall, but I had heard a sound I knew well--cockroach carapace crunching.

Whirling around, I was appalled.

A tiny sub wall had been built about one cm, or a third of an inch, deep on some of the walls on the house to hang the most recent wallpaper upon.

Cockroaches had filled the gap. They must have been living, eating the glue on the wallpaper backing, dying, eating each other, and building up for years.

Fortunately, my chemical cocktail had killed them all, too.

In the end, I cleaned everything up, had new wallpaper put up, including on the ceiling, and I had a fantastic apartment.

No cockroach entered that apartment for 14 months. By then your humble scribe and your Heroine, who had also moved in, were owned by their first joint cat, Chips, who took it upon himself to eradicate all cockroaches unwise enough to enter.

And we never had to worry about cockroaches again.

Thank goodness there are no cockroaches here in Hong Kong; your hero Pommes is untested still when it comes to cockroaches and I do not want to make another bomb, although I learned to love the bomb in Taiwan.

Tchuess,

Chris, Regina, and Pommes who is lying on my forearms looking at me in wonder