blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

The executive clemency given to convicted plunderer former Philippines President Erap Estrada has had op ed and blog writers airing their opinions. The grant of pardon is a prerogrative of the Sovereign as the fount of mercy. Kings and Queens have used this right rather sparingly. In a republic the people is sovereign but they are represented by the President who is supposed to represent the will of the people. Obviously our own Gloriana being the Queen of the State of the Nation got her cue from the First Gloriana who defeated the Armada, and is known as the Virgin Queen, who was never insecure (having inherited Henry VIII's bravado and good pragmatic sense) and gave pardons to her subjects but not to her treasonous lover, the Earl of Essex. While the nobles expected Gloriana to pardon Essex, she stiffened her resolved and signed his death warrant! Gloriana wanted to show to her subjects that she was a wise ruler as she faced the end of her reign. The Queen's reign ends with...

Guimaras, the island province in the central Philippines is an image of the perfect holiday spot. The massive oil spill in Guimaras province happened more than a year ago. While government agencies have declared the area already clean. The truth is what seems to be a recovered ecosystem is only on the surface. We circumnavigated the island's coastline on foot to see what has happened since then. Oil residues are still on the beach. Some of the Mangroves remain defoilated In the year since the spill, tourism, people's fishing livelihoods as well as the whole island economy has been affected. The black stuff on the sand are actually remains of oil residues that have percolated through the coral sand and remains in the unoxygenated layers of sediment

Iloilo City - I am in Iloilo for the 9th National meeting of the Philippine Association of Marine Science. So much has changed in this friendly city since the last time I was here about ten years ago. There are more buildings, malls and roadworks are everywhere and of course the traffic jams but the Ilonggo charm is still there. The province boasts of the first world class Iloilo International Airport in Santa Barbara town about 1.5 hours from the city center. The Iloilo airport is probably the most efficient airport in the whole Philippines. One can be out of the plane and onto ground transport in 15 minutes or less. It puts the Manila airport to shame! I felt that I landed in Cairns International in Australia. The Iloilo airport looks like the Australian one. But it seems that the infrastructure that should support airport business and functions are not yet there. In most airports in the world, if you plan to make changes to your flight plans you can easily change your bookings at th...

I have tried on-line bookings with Philippine Airlines (PAL) and its rival Cebu Pacific . We have been PAL loyalists all along until PAL's financial position crashed (oooops. pardon the pun!) and was forced to cut domestic and international routes. Cebu Pac took over some of the routes and I had no choice but to take that airline (which then had old DC 9s). On the way back to Australia in 1998 my PAL ticket took me nowhere since PAL shut down and I had to fly Singapore Airlines at an added cost. Now that PAL is out of receivership as its full page ads in the blurbs declare, we hope that the service does improve for the better. I believe PAL has new planes. But there is one problem with the on line booking. PAL's website generated a itinerary (IT) confirmation of my Manila-Iloilo return ticket but the IT receipt is the real electronic ticket (ET) and it took me 36 hours to get the ET in my email addy. Contrast this with my recent bookings to Dumaguete and Kuala Lumpur with r...

The Philippine Daily Inquirer's (PDI) editorial for today is entitled "Holy Innocent" in which the blurb suggests that Reverend Ed Panlilio return the money to the Palace. As I have earlier made clear Panlilio made himself walk a spaghetti thin moral tightrope when he accepted the money. So the legal step to be taken is to return the money. I would agree but as usual the Inquirer editorial has serious logical flaws and non-sequiturs! First the PDI assumes that the priest is trained to be obedient. Possibly. But is Panlilio obedient to his bishop now that he is governor? I doubt it if he were he should have obeyed the Pope and not run for office. Thus we cannot really assume that Father Panlilio and Governor Panlilio are the same men now. Also read this "A pastor is bound by divine law. The politician’s actions, on the other hand, are permanently circumscribed by secular law. When the politician tries to be a pastor, the law becomes an obstacle to the higher purpose,...

It is really a matter of conscience. The bribe giver believes that conscience has a price and the bribe taker agrees that conscience can be sold. This makes me recall two interesting bribery scenes dished out by Hollywood in the movies. Incidentally these two scenes come from two of my favourite movies that got the Oscar best picture award (and best actor awards for the leading cast). The first one is a scene from Robert Bolt's "Man for all Seasons" when Thomas More was at the height of his powers and favour from King Henry VIII. While coming out of Cardinal Wolsey's Hampton Court Palace, he received a silver cup from Averil Machin, woman with a request from the court of requests of which More was the presiding judge. More also received gifts of candied apples to which More replied "ah to sweeten my judgement. I'll give your son the judgement as if he were my own, a fair one." He did not accept the apples but accepted Machin's cup. In a later scene, ...

As I am going on another trip to Washington DC (to attend the People and the Planet gab), I had to apply for a new visitor's visa. My old one was replaced by a J1 visa when I was an exchange prof at Louisiana State University( and this expired when my appointment at the university was over). So I needed to pay the 100 dollar fee and set an appointment which was originally scheduled for 12 October, a Friday. But since that day was declared the Eid al Fitri holiday, the embassy scheduled a new time for me at 2:30 PM the following Monday. The procedures are largely the same the last time around except they have streamlined the finger scanning procedure. (cellphones, digicams, laptops and all sorts of gadgets are not allowed) Since the appointment numbers are chosen at random before one sees the consul, one can't read a book whilst waiting for your turn. (I was planning to lug along my new translation of Don Quixote. Cervantes' opus is apropro for this kind of situation!) So t...

Environment practitioners and environmentalists must be overjoyed that the Nobel committee has given this year's peace prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Gore who will go down in history as the environmentalist president the USA never had, is now a household name for the Oscar winning docu "An Inconvenient Truth". Such is Gore's campaign to inform the public that the film is required viewing in countless high schools and colleges all over the world. The film is also seen by Pinoys in many barangays. In one coastal barangay I visited recently, the whole village viewed the movie (pirated version!) in the local videoke bar. In my environmental science institute, we require students to watch "Inconvenient Truth" after we have had studied the various theories in environmental science and climate change. However we also require students to watch the alternate take on the issue "Global Warming Swindle" before we wr...

This brouhaha about "Desperate Housewives" and discrimination of Pinoy healthcare professionals in the USA has reached rather ridiculous proportions. The unflattering references to the quality of medical education in the Philippines of course deserves comment and condemnation but so far the Pinoy op ed columnists have largely missed the point. Some Americans (especially those in Hollywood) are rather discriminating on whom to discriminate and cast racial slurs. True that these TV series and the parodies on the networks have a field day hitting at Dubya Bush, Hillary, Barack, Dick and all sorts of characters and viewers are inured to these. Besides this parodying is actually protected by the First Amendment. Barack,Hillary, Dick and Dubya aren't discriminated in the parody. Hollywood may at times hit at blacks and sometimes this raises some comment. But Hollywood won't even dare cast slurs on gays and lesbians. That would kill the networks. So we won't see any Terr...

Today is the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Animals, Ecologists, Environment, Environmental Scientists, Pets, Pet lovers, birds, wolves, worms, fish, frogs, snakes San Francisco, CA, Frisco Del Monte QC and all Kikos on the Planet. Francis is really the Saint of Nature. Allow me to greet you a hearty "Happy World Animal Day!" It is apt that today is also World Animal Day in honour of the Saint. One big issue that faces all animal lovers and keepers is whether it is morally right to have zoos. The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) organization wants the Manila Zoo shut and the animals released into the wild. The Mayor of Manila diasgrees. The zoo is the only wildlife park that is accessible and affordable to the masses. Yes there are other zoos in the Philippines most are privately owned and charge a higher ticket price than what Manila Zoo charges. The question now brought before us is whether it is humane to see animals kept in enclosures....

While I find Michael Tan's op ed column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer interesting reading,I found his latest column Wanted:Female nothing but plain stereotyping of heterosexual males and their mothers! Awful! While it is true that some mums do spoil their bratty boys, I don't think that all mums do spoil their kids. Also many boys do household chores though there are still some gender division of labour on the kind of chores done. If boys do chores, will they be as bratty as Mike Tan thinks they are? I know classmates from elementary school who come from a family of all boys and they do chores. Now no one doubts their masculinity. I also know a classmate who comes from a family of all girls. Now she had to do boy things like help dad fix the car. No one in his/her right mind would say she isn't feminine. And what's wrong with "Diskarte"? Females also practise their own kind of "diskarte"? And what's wrong with "pare"talk? If the me...

This should make Papa Ratzi and the Tridentine Mass fans extremely happy. Wikipedia is now in Latin ! This should make fans get to know Latin usage beyond what the Old Missal has. Proponents of the Latin Vicipaedia version of the free encyclopaedia say that "Latin isn't dead but just smells funny!" Latin isn't dead at all. It lives on in the Romance Languages. It lives on in the vision of Benedict XVI who has given permission for the wider use of the Latin Mass. Latin fans finally have their intelligible own home in the web. They say Ecce nostra Taberna et Legatio. Which translates as Here is our beerhouse and embassy! (In Philippine English) Behold our pub and embassy! (In the Queen's English) In which case we might end up in ebrium. And recall that in Pompeii in the last day before the volcano spewed its Plinian column of ash, civis Romanum bibit Vesuvinum which is the first known marketing pun ever. But my Latin has got rusty. I had to learn Latin when I was d...

The two Burmese colleagues I have worked with in academe are both exiles. They have got their PhDs but can't return to their country. One studied at the Australian National University but before then he was a tutor in one of my tutorials when I was doing my own PhD. The other worked on his science PhD in UP and taught for a time at my department after graduation. When his some in his (including children I was told) were imprisoned by the despotic regime in Rangoon, he went home to pick up his kids but was eventually able to escape and live in Scotland since he had British citizenship. In an email from a Scottish university, he wrote that he did not decide to come back to democratic Philippines since according to him we are to "friendly" to the generals. To which I replied it isn't us but the current Malacanang tenant! The other Burmese friend of mine is now in India where his family (related to Aung San Suu Kyi) has been in exile for 25 years, where he was born. His ...

I really have no windows to how Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago's mind operates. My eyes do not function as a PET scanner. But her latest and most famous tirade about China "inventing corruption" is some fodder for comment. Rightly the Chinese Embassy and the Chinoy community were outraged. But some Chinoy businesspeople I think went overboard when one Chinoy bigwig emphatically stated that in China corrupt people get executed! Now we respect a country's legal system when it determines what penalty to match a crime. But there is a really big question on the fairness of the Chinese legal system. That's why the Hong Kong SAR citizens of China always have the shivers! Unlike when she broke her word to jump off a plane without a parachute, Miriam Santiago has apologized to China and to the Chinoy community. In an interview with a TV network, she admitted that she was emotional and had "chronic fatigue syndrome". I think this apology isn't enough. Whi...

In Louisiana I shared an apartment with a Shiite Muslim from Iran. He was an Engineering student. People asked me what it was like living with a follower of Islam. Some people even thought I was dumb for doing so. They thought that I was living with "terrorists". The level of distrust between Christians and Muslims is still there though on the surface people try to look "tolerant". Tolerance is really in the heart. Let me share my experience. I learned from my Shiite friend that people in Iran are fond of beans and I got to taste how Iranians cook their beans and lamb. I also showed him what Filipinos eat. He liked "laing". We talk about the latest Hollywood flicks and of course Iranian and Filipino cinema. My friend was surprised that Iranian movies are shown in Manila. And when we talk about the Holy Quran and the Holy Bible, our discussion is really what is common to both Holy books without putting down the differences. And I learned why Muslims pray ...

Now that Manila Mayor Fred Lim has got rid of the pubs, Baywalk regains its laid back ambiance. We just hope the good mayor can soon spruce up the Baywalk as many of the fixtures and landscaping here have become rundown.

The nearest white sand beach to Manila is right on her shores. Manila Bay has a white sand beach that is purely made of shells. There was a time when this beach stretched from Ermita to Pasay. Early American era photographs and a Fabian de la Rosa painting show Pasay Beach at sunset. Pasay Beach was a favourite bathing beach of locals and colonials where the World Trade Center is now. We can imagine from this September 2007 photo of the "US Embassy Beach" near the northernmost end of Baywalk what it may have looked like. The picture reeks of nostalgia that is until you smell the sewage and see the garbage! Sorry to take you out of nostalgia ville, this is what this white sand beach really looks like! Under piles of trash is the white sand. If we can just clean up the bay then Manila can give Boracay a run for its money! Sometimes I wish I was born in the early 1900s if just to see what Manila was. But what we have are the sepia and colorized photos and paintings. This str...

Mr Manolo Quezon has done this country (at least its intellectuals and those who pretend to be one :) ) a great favour by writing about President Ferdinand E Marcos in today's Philippine Daily Inquirer. Mr Quezon's piece is the most objective to date about the late president. It is about time that we put an objective eye on the Marcos presidency for the sake of our nation so that we can avoid the same mistakes. I don't know if someone has tried to do a study about the political and social ideology of Mr Marcos. My late dad had a complete collection of Marcosiana and guess who inherited it? Me! So I have begun to read some of Mr Marcos' books. I just realised that there is a heap of possible PhDs and MAs to be made from this. Someone can do a PhD on why Marcos' ideology is really scientific in his rebuttal of Marxism (Marcos admits that even his ideology can be falsified in the Popperian sense! Can anyone remind Jose Maria Sison and ex-colleagues at the Poli Sci dep...

In Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons", the Earl of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of England was sent to collect the Chancellor's chain of office from Cardinal Wolsey, who was dying in Leicester Abbey. Norfolk said "Thank God you're dying here. The King would have sent you to the Tower!" The Tower is where Lords, other members of the nobility, knights, princes and princesses and even Kings were jailed. This leads us to an ancient tradition where these people are held in comfy detention. In some cases they have their whole household with them. In 1995, I went on a special tour of the Tower of London. I got to see where the nobles were detained, their heads chopped off, where funeral services were held and where their remains lay. Of course the main tourist drawers then as now were the two ravens (legend says that they guarantee that the monarchy survives) and the beefeaters (who until 2007 were all ex-servicemen of reputation. Now London has a servicewoman be...

Boracay Mansion The pictures in the blurbs of the Erap Estrada's so called "Boracay Mansion" reminds me of the pictures of and my quick visit in 1995 to Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli just outside Rome. Tsk tsk. How the mighty have fallen! The Villa was considered to be the epitome of Imperial taste that the popes and cardinals plundered the site for statuary to grace their palaces. In Erap's villa the roof was plundered and also steel railings and the legendary gold faucets. By the plunder we shall know the plunderer. Plunder begets more plunder! A lowdown in UP education I asked my undergrads and not a few freshies about the recent hazing death by a well known frat. The students said that the tuition fee increases are a more important issue than the hazing death. Since when has a wasted human life been less important than a tuition fee increase? I think the professors and administrators of the University of Philippines should reflect on the moral dimensions of UP...