blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

It may surprise the reader that scientists are spiritual creatures too. The Roman Church recognizes sainthood (by canonization) of pious people who can be exemplars for the faithful to live lives of holiness. The Catholic Church being in the fullest sense, catholic, has saints for almost every calling in life ir life's problems. And Catholics call these people as "patron saints". Lawyers have St Thomas More. Doctors have St Luke. Even the Internet has its own patron saint, St Isidore of Seville, who 1000 years before the World Wide Web was invented, wrote 20 volumes of the Etymologiae documenting the knowledge of his time. It is said that the work is like a relational database. Countries and other geographic entities have their saints too. You may get the hives because of a hairy caterpillar. You then call on St Magnus of Fussen (Who is he?! Where is Fussen?) Saints also carry national identities even if they never lived in the country were they are patrons. For example ...

I have to thank Nanay's (Soccoro Ramos) National Bookstore (NBS) for making available decent books at affordable prices. I'm not advertising NBS but the truth is my bibliophilic generation is truly "Laking National". When we were much younger, only NBS had carried good books in many of its branches. True there were other more specialist bookstores with fine books like Erehwon, Bookmark, Solidaridad and Popular, these bookstores were located in faraway Makati and Ermita (I lived in QC) or in the case of Popular just off Avenida Rizal near the Rathaus beerhouse. The first two bookshops are defunct, Sionil-Jose's Solidaridad is still around and Popular has moved to a trendier location on Quezon City's Tomas Morato near the Boy Scout roundabout. When I was an undergrad, a lefty friend of mine and I would take public transpo to get to Popular since this was the only place where we can read "commie" books. This is where I got my whole edition of Marx's...

Galileo is the first modern experimental scientist. There is no one alive that can probably match him. One of the stylists for the modern Italian essay, he is one of the first writers in Italy to write in Italian not in Latin as was the practice among the learned. His decision to write science in the vernacular attracted condesension from the philosophers and the theologians. (Much earlier two famous Italians, Dante and Saint Francis of Assisi, wrote the founding works of Italian literature, the Divina Commedia and the Canticle of the Sun thereby establishing that Italian was capable of expressing the highest human ideals ). Galileo intellectualized Italian and spread scientific ideas wider by writing in that language. Galileo established that a vernacular can reasonably express Science. Galileo was no atheist. Unlike what the atheist Richard Dawkins had to endure, Galileo had to face the worst kind of peer review then available (The Holy Office with threats of rack and torture). In a ...