blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

I do not know James Soriano but those netizens who know him say he is an Ateneo de Manila senior. The essay he wrote for the Manila Bulletin is honest on his experience in the use of English and Filipino in Filipino society. The mass of Filipino society especially on the net will label him as conyo , but we cannot fault him for that. The class stratification in Philippine society is sharply demarcated by language use as this blogger writes . This cuts across regional and cultural boundaries. Since in almost all political jurisdictions, those who are elected to public office belong to the elite, we can observe that signs in public buildings are in English or may be bilingual but the sign in a Philippine language is less conspicuous than the one in English. I have seen and stared at these while peeing  in countless toilets in the Visayas and Mindanao, where a warning (pahibalo) in not flushing the toilet will result in a fine. The warning is in large font English and the one in ...

Former UP Law dean Raul Pangalangan wrote probably the most sane comment on the "Poleteismo" brouhaha at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP).  He exposes Philippine society's "grave misconceptions on why we offer communal protection for expressive freedoms".  The law dean notes the hate mail and messages sent the CCP which threatened the safety of CCP employees and so the center shut down the exhibit. For starters following Thomas Jefferson, I swear to be"in eternal enmity over any tyranny over the mind of man". I am against any entity that censors and/or vandalizes art. Rightly so because the Nazi Holocaust started by vandalizing "degenerate art", then burning books which then led to burning people! However not all art is uplifting, some are offensive. For me the only way to deal with offensive art is not to look at them. Another example: offensive literature cannot be banned without shooting liberty and democracy in the foot....

UP President Alfredo Pascual gives his views on research at the UP With apologies to Blaise Pascal we paraphrase his famous wager as "If the fact that UP is really a top notch university cannot be revealed by reason alone, then a rational UP alumnus should wager as if UP really is tops!" This probably was in the mind of UP President Alfredo Pascual when he spoke to the scientists and researcher academics at the latest "Kapihan" at the UP Marine Science Institute newly refurbished auditorium last Friday, August 5, 2011. Diliman Diary has reported on what was discussed. Do you notice what is wrong with the above wager? Answer: Any rational mind will be able to conclude that the wager has a false predicate! UP is not tops! To insist it is, is to hold on to a delusion! The University of the Philippines is faced with a serious and increasing budgetary shortfall. The coming fiscal year saw the university budget slashed by Congress to the tune of 800 millio...

Dear Chris You were never my student in Environmental Science 1 but some of your classmates from Malcolm Hall were. One of them told me the tale of the floating car before I saw it plastered on Facebook! But despite you being taken for a fool, I don't think you really are! You were just one exasperated taxpayer! As I have written earlier, Metro Manila is an extremely dangerous urban environment where the mere act of using the streets as a pedestrian or as a motorist (as you have found out to your humiliation by an unkind Pinoy social networking community) can kill! Example: At one flooded street in Manila, several people were reported to have been electrocuted when they held on to a fancy lamp post for support during a flood. It appeared that the lamp post had no insulation that makes them "all weather"! I heard you are about to take the Bar and some of my lawyer friends hope that you will pass so that ALL will be informed (the networks included). But more than th...

Almost every year I teach an undergraduate course in environmental science where towards the end of the semester we discuss relevant issues. In the first half of the semester we discuss and learn about the physical and biological processes that make the environment an interesting thing to observe and in the latter half, we deal with how we poor humans have to deal with a changing environment using our 1) wits and 2) technology! It is no secret that Metro Manila is one of the most dangerous urban environments to live in. Architects and city planners Paulo Alcazaren and Gerard Lico have written so much about how Metro Manila's unplanned urban sprawl, booming population and bad governance has made the problem worse. The two gentlemen have pointed out that these problems bedeviled Manilans even in the Spanish colonial period, except then, there were only less than a million Manilans compared to the 13-14 million today. Thus in a time of rainfall shifts, a moderate downpour of 10-15 ...