blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

The news services and blurbs report that the single toilet in the International Space Station broke down and the astronauts and cosmonauts have to use the one in the emergency Soyuz capsule. Pioneers and explorers have had that problem before. Now that really wasn't a problem when Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue or when Magellan sailed around the world. They can just do what nature requires at the rear of the ship! We have building codes on Planet Earth that legally requires architects and engineers to calculate the number of toilets in a building depending on the number of occupants. Now why didn't NASA and the Russian Space Agency ever thought of adding a spare toilet? The closest analogue to the astronauts problem on Earth is when you go camping and you can't do your thing in the bush. (There are some camp grounds that prohibit doing it in the bush!) You find that the humus toilet is kaputt! So you have to do it in your car! The Vatican has just reiterated its ban on orda...

Yahoo Philippines has this news bit about the DSWCD requesting MTRCB to screen TV shows that make fun of the disabled. It's about time. We really have to develop more sensitivity about discrimination. But DSWCD should go further, not only the disabled should be protected from this abuse but the beauty-challenged (ugly), the height challenged (short people) and of course people with dark complexions. This should extend to the financially challenged (poor) sector of society. Racial,economic and gender stereotyping have been the staple of Pinoy comedy. Gays have been the subject of a zillion laughs. The irony is that many of the screenwriters who write these gags are themselves gay! How can society respect gays if gays can't respect themselves? We really need an anti-discrimination law that has teeth. But if these anti-discrimination proposals become law Joey de Leon would lose his comedy show. But seriously a culturally sensitive attitude will involve a sea change for Pinoy soc...

I saw the Meralco stockholders meeting in the evening newscast. As a extremely minor stockholder in some big corporations, I never attended a stockholders meeting trusting that whoever gets elected to the board of directors he/she will lead the company profitably. Weeks before, GSIS President Winston Garcia threatened to buy out the Lopezes from the company. This was apparently with blessings from Her Majesty the Queen. It is not the first time that the King or in our case the Queen has tried to take over a private enterprise. Like Henry VIII who dissolved the Monasteries, Gloria I tried to "dissolve" Meralco by bringing up the spectre of high energy costs. While Henry had his Cromwell, Gloria has her Winston. The only similarities between them is that both royal subalterns are in their faces! But her Winston is no Churchill. In a globalized economy, doing a Ferdinand I on the Lopezes is nigh impossible unless Gloria I declares martial law (which requires Congressional assent...

Drivers like me have noticed something in the last few weeks. Ever since coming back from a spate of field work in April and May, I have noticed that there are fewer cars on Manila's main streets even on weekdays. It was possible for me to go to Manila Ocean Park in Luneta from Diliman in 30 minutes on a weekday! On weekends even on a Saturday (the worst day according to motorists) when number coding is not in effect, there is less traffic nowadays. The crisis has taken a big bite. The first sign of a recession is less cars on the road. Fewer people will go to the malls, such as the one owned by the Gokongweis. And speaking of the Gokongweis, the Kwentong Peyups of the Philippine Star last Sunday (25 May) had Robina Gokongwei's commencement speech to the centennial graduates of the UP School of Economics. You can download a pdf file of her speech at the UP Econ website . Robina is famous for having been kidnapped in the early 80s when she was an Econ senior. Thus she was sent o...

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 ...

I first saw the Indiana Jones movies as a high school student. Seeing Harrison Ford in the Indy movies was a refreshing change from his Han Solo character of the then Star Wars trilogy. Of course the formula was similar. As the www.ihatestarwars.com once had it in 1999 (when the prequels came out,one by one), Indiana Jones is nothing but Han Solo battling Nazis. (BTW, the ihatestarwars site has been off the web) Indiana Jones was a "tenured professor of archaeology". The prof had a PhD and can have all that adventures in exotic digs. That would attract UP Diliman campus brats (our parents were academics with PhDs) to consider having a career in academe. But in reality academe is a tad more boring. UP has an archaeological studies programme and I haven't known its director Victor Paz wearing a fedora! Of course the original three movies 20 years ago were more fun. We were "cold war kids who were hard to kill" as Billy Joel sang about and the "Lost Ark...

George W Bush and Tony Blair crushed Saddam's Iraq in 2003 because of the purported existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). However there was no evidence that Saddam possessed stockpiles of WMD at the time of the Iraq invasion. The moral underpinning of the invasion was placed into question. In Burma, the Junta has largely refused the international aid to cyclone Nargis victims. Aid has been seized at the airport, the Burmese authorities have refused visas to aid workers. Millions of Burmese are in risk for dying of infectious diseases unless food and medical aid reaches them.The Burmese Junta is in a state of xenophobia that is destroying their own people. The UN has been pressed into action. It has tried persuasion and later condemnation of the Burmese regime but to no avail. The Security Council had authorized military interventions "police actions" in the past. If the powers need to it can be conveniently ignored like what the Americans and the British did in...

Looc, Tablas Island, Romblon I just spent a week in Looc,Tablas looking at the possibility of doing a shell resources survey here and writing a shell catalogue. I was a guest of Mr Aggie Ngo, a prominent businessman here who owns Gieshelles Resort. Mr Ngo's hospitality is something else! We went to the community organized Looc Fish Sanctuary. There are lots of fish and the occassio nal shark. The shark tale spooked a few tourists. I had to tell people that this means that the fish community has really recovered. Romblon is not known as a shell collectors paradise but it really is. The province's relative isolation (flight frequencies are low, a boat ride from Batangas takes 9 hours) makes it off the beaten track. The beaten track ends in overhyped Boracay,which is only 1.5 hours away by regularly scheduled pumpboat ferry. But even then Boracay tourists rarely find themselves in Looc. The few who do make it here (after getting stressed by Boracay crowds) attest that they would...