Songs people sing when they are sad
I once heard from a friend that whenever she gets exhausted in the office, she gets this intense desire to sing Chaka Khan’s Through the Fire at the end of the day. I remember the song distinctly because I first heard it from a bar when a coed in the audience took to the stage, and sang Through the Fire with such intensity that I knew not a few people were infinitely curious exactly what she had been through. It was such an intense performance that whenever I hear the song today I remember that girl onstage singing it, microphone on her hand and tears welling from her eyes. And even up to this time I often wonder what was the sad story behind that girl singing Chaka Khan in 1999.

One person I know said that whenever he gets sad, all he needs to hear is the Beachboys’ Kokomo and he would forget all his troubles in an instant. This song must really be beloved because another friend told me that he imagines heaven with flying angels, white cirrus clouds and stereo playing Kokomo. The flying angels, my friend told me, he got from his catechism, the cirrus clouds he got from his fourth grade science teacher and Kokomo he got in 1993 when a distant radio was playing it on the beach on a full moon.

I took a survey of some people and I’ve come up with this list of songs people hum when they are feeling a bit blue:

1. Seasons in the Sun by Westlife.

2. Honesty by Billy Joel.

3. Please Release Me (Let me Go) by Tom Jones.

4. Ne Me Quitte Pas by Jacques Brel.

5. Take Me (I’ll Follow You) by Bobby Caldwell.

6. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.

7. Tomorrow from the musical Annie.

8. It’s a Beautiful Life by Ace of Base.

My friend, who is apparently of the Roberto Benini weltanschauung, told me that the best way to cope with dejection is to deny its existence. Blast It’s A Beautiful Life to full volume, he said, and you are on your way to bliss—or Gollum’s schizophrenia, I added.

Songs or without songs, the wonderful thing about melancholy, my way of putting it, is that you always have the ultimate power to end it. If you really can take it no longer, you can always fling yourself down a precipice and be over it. Smells like teen spirit, wouldn’t you say?

Summer of our discontent
Professor Felipe Miranda ponders the desolateness of the country's political condition in his Philippine Star column today:

The poor survive unaccountably. The powerful shun accountability in the course of their "democratic" rule. Plunderers rob their hapless constituencies blind; the latter quietly suffer their victimization and paradoxically even take pity on their merciless predators.

Private sector "entrepreneurs" concoct and get away with risk-free ventures, each venture enjoying a "sovereign" guarantee awarded by extremely accomodating political administrations. When these ill-inspired ventures fail as may be expected, the preferred solution by cavalier authorities is to unload losses on the country’s born losers – the general public.

Miranda adds that the miracle of it all is "that this nation of over 40 million registered voters generally reflect no revulsion...."

This too has been the greatest mystery to me. Why do the people keep electing rotten officials, humbly accepting their lot without a single thought that things can and should get decidedly better? Surely the lower classes cannot be rationally considered as being contented with their lot, but why do they not protest?

One friend told me that the explanation is simple: feudalism. The people think that they can change their lot only through the mediation of our feudal politicians, dispensing large amounts of stolen money during elections. The democratic idea of a citizen paddling his own course, determing the course of the nation-state by his individual vote, has not yet sunk in our political consciousness. A genuine democracy is a polity of citizens who naively believe in the power of one.

Our people do not exercise their power of one. They prefer to surrender it to some trapo politicians, who, little did our people know, are, in fact, just as ignorant as they are, albeit arguably with better clothes. In A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul, the protagonist Salim has a contempt for the Third World. For Salim, citizens of the Third World all too readily surrender their masculinities to great men. They say to a Mahatma Gandhi or a Mao ZeDong, "Here is our masculinity, we surrender it, please invest it for us." Nobody feels responsible and all the burden falls on the shoulders of the great man appointed by history.

I think a similar thing is operative in our total dependence on the country's rotten political ruling class, except that nobody among it has managed to become a great man in the style of Gandhi. (President Arroyo was even at pains to point out that she has no desire whatsoever to be great.) We have surrendered our masculinities to our politicians and they have squandered the capital. Unfortunately, there is no reason to suppose that the coming elections in May would be different from our prior investments. Oh well, caveat emptor.

Incunabula online
The British Library is offering incunabula for everybody to browse-- online. They wouldn't let anyone touch the actual books, of course, but through the web, you get the virtual experience of browsing the books, including the Diamond Sutra, the Chinese Buddhist scroll printed in 868 and considered the world's oldest, dated, printed book. Browse your incunabula here.

Erap sweet lover
The Manila Times reports that former President Estrada is hoping his sex life would improve once he is transferred to his private resort across Camp Capinpin where he is detained. The Manila Times reports that:

The detention quarters are also “not conducive [to sex],” Estrada said. “The room should be sweet-smelling, have a huge bed and a bathtub.”

Asked if his rest house, which is across the road from the camp, has all the amenities to spice up his humdrum sex life, he said with a grin: “Puwede na din iyon [It will do].”

After the ailing knees, is Estrada now pleading debilitating non-sex life? A novel legal question.

VOLUNTEER WORK for CINEMANILA
If you want to meet interesting people, see award-winning foreign films and get your adrenaline pumping from working at a crazy festival pace, volunteer for the 6th Cinemanila International Film Festival, to be held this year from June 24 – July 5, 2004. We are looking for bright and mature individuals who don’t require a lot of hand-holding to join this year’s team.

We are looking for full time volunteers and interns.

Interns are responsible for a wide range of clerical/administrative assisting duties, in addition to a bit of fact checking, on-line research, and occasional writing. Because we are a relatively small organization, interns have the opportunity to get to know all of our staff, and to really see how a film festival is put together. You will also get the chance to meet filmmakers from all over Asia and Europe and see Cinemanila movies for free. Unfortunately, we are not able to pay our interns for their time.

Full time summer interns are required to put in at least 35 hours per week (some weekends included). We can offer students at any stage of their college experience academic credit for their internship. We also accept recent graduates.

Qualifications: Writing, editing, research, interviewing and phone skills relevant. Basic computer proficiency important.
Internships are available in the following departments: Marketing, Film Traffic, Guest Services, Theater Coordination, Promotions and Publicity, Editorial, Creative, Photography and Administration.

Requirements:
To apply please send your resume with a cover letter specifying which department you are interested in interning / volunteering for. PLEASE SEND ALL RESUMES DIRECTLY TO ciffsecretariat@yahoo.com.

NOTES: This internship may qualify for academic credit. Please check with your school. This is a non-paying internship. Small stipends are available under certain circumstances and for published work. Inquire for details (email only, no phone calls please).

DEADLINE TO APPLY:

Summer (May-June) April 30, 2004 (Friday)

Getting the hots for Susan Roces
Roxas City vice-mayoral candidate Allan Celino must have a taste for older women, because he reportedly fondled Susan Roces in some delicate parts, prompting the latter to take a swing at him.

If the above incident is true, the question is: Is there such a dearth of local talents in Roxas City that maniacs get a chance to run for the recspectable office of the vice mayor? If a candidate cannot control his enthusiasm for Susan Roces and limit it within the bounds of propriety, how can the people expect him to control his appetite for other things like power and public money? I wonder what Celino's wife had to say about the incident.

Sororities exposed
This is one expose Manong Maceda would have loved investigating in the Senate. A writer went undercover in an American state university and she discovered plenty, among others: boob ranking, naked parties and girls hooking up with each other. Read Newsweek's interview with the author of Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities for more salacious details.

Pac-man
TIME has a profile of Manny Pacquiao.

The democratic merits of blogging
I finished reading Lessig's Free Culture (see an earlier post to download your free copy) yesterday. Lessig, a blogger himself, has this take on blogging:

Discussing matters of public import, criticizing others who are mistaken in their views, criticizing politicians about the decisions they make, offering solutions to problems we all see: blogs create the sense of a virtual public meeting, but one in which we don't all hope to be there at the same time and in which conversations are not necessarily linked. The best of the blog entries are relatively short; they point directly to words used by others, criticizing with or adding to them. They are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have.

Blogs are taking the place of the Roman stoa and the French salon.

The gist of the book is this: In many times in history, a new technology changed the way content was distributed. And in all instances, the law accomodated the new technology. This pattern of legal accomodation, this pattern of deference to new technologies has now changed with the rise of the Internet. Rather than striking a balance between the claims of a new technology and the legitimate rights of content creators, both the US courts and Congress have imposed legal restrictions that will have the effect of smothering the new to benefit the old.

A story used by Lessig earlier in his book is most illustrative of the accomodation that he speaks of. Before the Wright brothers invented the airplane, American law held that a property owner presumptively owned not just the surface of his land, but all the land below, down to the center of the earth, and all the space above, to “an indefinite extent, upwards.” A flying plane therefore under this doctrine was a trespasser to private property since property rights were understood to extend up to the sky. The US Supreme Court in this case overturned the old doctrine and enunciated a new one: that the air is a public highway. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits.

Lessig argues for that same kind of accomodation with the internet. His outline of an alternative model of peer to peer file sharing, which appears in the last chapter, is a bit hazy though, but the book is a good read for internet aficionados.

3rd National Conference on E-Learning
Organized by the Philippine eLearning Society (PeLS)
With support from the IT & e-Commerce Council (ITECC)

Date and Venue: 6 August 2004
Ateneo de Manila University

Theme:
Human Development Through Networked Knowledge

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Practitioners of elearning in basic and higher education, non formal and technical-vocational education, and corporate training are invited to submit abstracts of papers to the 3rd National Conference on eLearning. Papers may be in the form of empirical research, case studies, and frameworks for decision-making regarding the application of information and communication technologies in education and training.

Abstracts must be 300-400 words long in Word *.doc or *.rtf file format. Email abstracts to papers@elearning.ph or send by fax or in hard copy format to:

Prof. Patricia B. Arinto
Chair
Papers Committee
3rd National Conference on eLearning
Rm. 217 National Computer Center
CP Garcia Ave., Quezon City
Tel No. (02)426-1514, (02)928-0138;
Fax No. (02)426-1515

Abstracts must be submitted by May 21, 2004. Authors should indicate their contact numbers and email address.

Notices of acceptance will be issued by June 5, 2004. The deadline for full papers (for those whose abstracts are accepted) is July 15, 2004.

This year's conference is organized by the Philippine eLearning Society (PeLS), which was founded on July 30, 2003 in Manila with the objective of promoting substantive content, appropriate pedagogy, and appropriate use of technology for eLearning, guided by ongoing research activities.

PeLS serves as a venue for:
* Promoting research on the effective use of eLearning
* Sharing of eLearning experiences
* Developing standards of excellence
* Promoting interoperability of eLearning systems
* Encouraging collaboration in the development of substantive content
* Cooperating with international eLearning groups
* Promoting public awareness and appreciation of the nature and uses of eLearning

Information on applying for membership and other PeLS matters can be found at http://www.elearning.ph.

--
Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo, Ph.D.
Chair
Department of Information Systems and Computer Science
Ateneo de Manila University

The ugly Chinese
Ambeth Ocampo in today's Inquirer quotes the observations made by visiting French painter Jean Mallat regarding the Chinese in the Philippines in the 19th century:

"In general, the Chinese settled in the Philippines are of average height, although in China itself there are many good-looking men... The Chinese inhabiting Manila who have come for the most part from Macao, Chancheo, Nyngo and Canton are very ugly, and this is explained partly by their social position, for these are generally coulis (porters) and domestics who come to the Philippines to do business and who send their savings every year to their families. Like all the Chinese of Macao, they speak a little Spanish or Tagal[og]. Their costume is similar to that of coulis of Macao and Canton; this is a kind of overcoat in the form of a blouse, a shirt called bisia and wide pants made of white cloth, with very low seat, fastened by a string; sometimes these pants are black or blue."

If the Chinese immigrants were ugly, their mestizo children were even uglier, according to the French :

"Chinese mestizos, that is to say children of Chinese men and Indio women, are often uglier than the Chinese themselves... they have yellowish skin, wide faces, their noses are flat, though less so than the Indios; their eyes are slanted outwards and the transversal diameters form an obtuse angle on the nose; they are lymphatic and beardless..."

Leftist wind, when will thou blow
PCIJ has a a story on former leftist activists turned campaign operatives. The story notes that former leftist activists are now in positions of influence as political operatives in presidential campaigns.

There are 300,000 elective positions in the country. Surely, there are candidates or organizations out there that would need a political operative or an organizer. And some of us soon realized that it is far easier to run an electoral campaign than it is to bring down a government or to win a revolution.

Former leftists/leftists are in positions of influence now, it is true, but the Left remains within the margins of political power. Former cadres may be campaigning now, but not for their own candidacies and certainly not with leftist platform.

This got me to thinking why has it proven so hard for leftists to win Philippine elections? Former leftists win, alright (Nani Braganza, Mike Defensor); but current leftists do not. Do Filipinos find the political Left repulsive and out-of-synch with the interests of the people? When will we have our Lula? When will we hear vitriolic diatribes against our elite democracy from the balcony of Malacanang?

I don't know if this may be a harbinger, but South America is turning left. The elites in Venezuela are trying to fight it with all their might, but Chavez seems to be staying for good. Lula is popularly ensconced in Brazil and giving the WTO a headache. In Europe, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party unceremoniously defeated the Bush-identified government. The conservative Pope in Rome is ailing. Italy is just about waiting for Berlusconi to fall. The Washington consensus is showing signs of regime fatigue. Will the leftist wind ever reach the Philippine shores?

Prost(r)ate cancer
The lower back pain that was pestering Raul Roco was, according to his campaign manager Dr. Jaime Galvez-Tan, due to prostate cancer. The Philippine Star reports that tests done in the Philippines suggest that Roco has prostate cancer and that he would be seeking second opinion in the US upon the advise of his doctors.

My sister's classmate's father was also diagnosed with prostate cancer late last year, and, I've heard, was promptly advised to gorge on tomatoes. For more information on prostate cancer, the US National Cancer Institute offers some information.

Web prowl
An interview with Jacques Derrida on imperialism. A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram, the physicist who developed the Mathematica software and is often compared to Newton, is available online. Psychicpants blogs on Lapid's chicharon and cornik. Former US secretary of state George P. Shultz surveys the current Asian political and economic landscape. The life of Napoleon Bonaparte as a bookworm here. A London Review of Books essay asks the question, " Who removed Aristide?"

Adios patria adorada
Raul Roco's medical consultation in the US has all the simulacrum of a graceful concession. His presidential candidacy, despite the brave front he and the rest of his tattered Alyansa are putting on, is all but kaput. His leaving the country at this most inopportune time will surely be interpreted by a considerable number of his supporters as a tacit signal to abandon ship. Today reports that "Mahar Mangahas of the Social Weather Stations Inc. had said that if Roco dropped out of the race, the President would likely get 5.6 percent of his votes, while actor Poe Jr. would get 4.3 percent."

Rumors are rife that there must have been an understanding between the Arroyo camp and Roco. Some are also concerned that there may be a metastasis of Roco's prostate cancer. Whichever may be the real case, there is no doubt, as this Inquirer editorial suggests, that the most disheartened by the news are his youth volunteers, who have toiled hard campaigning for whatever remains of their juvenile idealism.

How can one console those volunteers? I guess they must take this episode of their lives as an opportunity to disabuse themselves of the unhealthy conception that one can win an election by sheer intellectual prowess and idealism. Like in any endeavor, there is simply no known substitute to good old hard cash. People respect cash, whatever its progeny. The next time that these volunteers engage in any election--their own or somebody else's-- they must make sure that they would never be outspent by their rivals. This is the cardinal rule of getting elected; candidates ignore it at their own peril.

THE 2004 DANIEL SINGER PRIZE: $5,000
In keeping with Daniel Singer's thesis that the promise of socialism remains the last best hope for humanity and civilization,The Daniel Singer Foundation invites submissions for the 2004 Prize, to be awarded for an original work of not more than 5,000 words, which explores the fundamental question: What Is the Soul of Socialism?

Essays may be in any language. The submissions will be judged by an international panel of distinguished experts appointed by the Foundation. The winner will be announced in December 2004, and the winner will be invited to deliver a public lecture based on the essay.

Submissions should be made not later than August 31, 2004, to:

The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation
P.O. Box 334,
Sherman CT 06784
All enquiries should be sent to this address.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez as crap?
Sacrilege of the first degree, I know, but Prem Rara thinks so. He describes One Hundred Years of Solitude as being " a good book but does not deserve your scarce free time."

I couldn't disagree more. In my opinion, the book is the best piece of literature to have been produced by the Third World in the twentieth century. Some, I know, would even hazard the opinion that it is the best piece of literature to have been produced in the twentieth century anywhere.

The opening pages are a little bit off-putting, true (despite the memorable opening sentence: Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.), but the divers stories within the novel are too interesting to miss after one hurdles the first chapter. I remember with great fondness the levitation of Remedios the Beauty with the flapping brabant sheets that rose up to heaven with her, the adolescent despot Buendia marching across town and lording it over during a civil war until his mother gave him a whipping, the horrific sight of the baby, the last of the Buendias, being dragged by the ants toward their holes, and, of course, the massacre at the train station during the banana plantation strike.

The book is one of my favorites. I learned from that book how history, far from being a rigid, objective and social scientific discipline, is actually a fluid, contentious and politically determined social artifact. The banana plantation massacre in the novel was ignored by history as if it never happened. The people thought Jose Arcadio Segundo was insane when he went around town telling tales of the execrable massacre of three thousand people. Garcia Marquez also portrayed in the book how do-gooding revolutionaries lose sight and forget the reasons for the revolution and continue fighting simply because of inertia and pride.

I strongly believe that Garcia Marquez would deserve a Nobel even if he had only written One Hundred Years of Solitude and nothing more. Too bad Rara didn't like it. Perhaps a re-reading is in order.

Books for bargain hunters
After meeting some friends somewhere at the Araneta Center in Cubao late this afternoon , I went to National Bookstore beside the Araneta Coliseum to look for Teodoro Agoncillo's Revolt of the Masses. (My Holy Week resolution was to start reading on Philippine history so as to fill the massive gap in my education. )

The bookstore did not have the Agoncillo book. It must have been sold out just recently because the last time I was there a copy was still on display. Not wanting to waste my effort altogether, I decided to go to my favorite section--the top floor where they put the books on sale.

The bookstore has a totally new collection of bargain brand-new books, and I was astounded by the quality of the books. Never before in my short life have I seen a more superior collection of books in a bookstore. I found three books I have been looking for for such a long time and bought them at bargain prices:

1) Robert Blake's Disraeli-- I know this book was a Bill Clinton favorite, and I was reading a book on Nixon last week, James Hume's Nixon's Ten Commandments of Leadership and Negotiation, and found out that it was Nixon's favorite as well.

2) Ian Kershaw's Hitler. I have always been fascinated by Hitler and his talent at selling his stupid ideas to the German people, and I've heard Kershaw's was the best biography of Hitler.

3) Professor Allan Bloom's translation of Rousseau's Emile. It was Allan Bloom's books that introduced me to poltical theory and I have always been in awe of Allan Bloom since then despite his terrible snobbism ( He, for one, thinks all pop music is trash and he only listens to classical music except Ravel's Bolero which he hates for being much too simplistic and popular among the youth.)

If any of you have time I highly advise that you take a look at the top floor of NBS Araneta Center. I remember seeing biographies of the ballet dancer Nureyev, Ho Chi Minh, Marie Antoinette, Madame de Pompadour, Alfred Kinsey, Gore Vidal, Saul Bellow, Gauguin, Peter the Great, Khrushchev, Mapplethorpe, Maria Callas, President Thabo Mbeki, Robert Burns, Lloyd George, Francis Bacon, many others I dont remember and, yes, even Robin Hood.

I saw collected works of JS Mill, various histories of the French revolution, a copy of Rousseau's Confessions, a history of British Labor political thought, Marshal Mcluhan's Medium and the Message, the memoirs of Louis Althusser,various copies of Thomas Friedman's Lexus and the Olive Tree, a book on DH Laurence's marriage. The bookstore was also selling Wordsworth editions of classics I' ve never before seen being sold in National bookstore, or in any other store for that matter, like Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Petronius's Satyricon.

The collection was too highbrow it blew my mind. I saw books you never expect National Bookstore would sell--and all at reduced prices. Light reading is also available. Books on musicians ranging from Beatles to Boyzone were also to be found. For those of more prurient interest, there is one whole shelf of classic erotica: Decameron, a bevy from anonymous authors, including one generally presumed to have been written by Oscar Wilde.

I think all other bookstores in Manila pale in comparison today. (The people behind PowerBooks like to think their collections are highbrow, but they delude themselves.) I highly recommend everyone to go the National at Araneta, take the escalators and go staright to the top floor, but please don't buy Peter the Great and the Principles of Public International Law which I have hidden right beside copies of Emile; I am yet looking for money to buy them.

Do I sound like some agent ? I was just too happy for finding such an abundance of good books being sold at sale prices, that's all.

French find Saint-Exupery's plane
After six decades of mystery, a French underwater salvage team has discovered the remains of the plane piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 60 years after he disappeared on a wartime reconnaissance mission over southern France.

Saint-Exupery's disappearance was one of the mysteries of the twentieth century, up there with Amelia Earhart's vanishing act. His Little Prince is beloved by many people, and is said to be the third most popular book after the Bible and Marx's Das Kapital. And irony of ironies, Saint-Exupery's Little Prince is commonly mistaken for Machiavellis' Prince. One friend from UP told me the story of one classmate who brought to class Saint-Ex's Little Prince when, in fact, what the professor requested was Machiavelli's Prince. The class had a good laugh.

I know many other people who, once in their lives, mistook one book for the other, but no two books could be so unlike. The Little Prince is a reflection on the meaning of life, a book for dreamers and idealists in short. Machiavelli's Prince, on the other hand, is a book for people who have come to realize the brutish nature of reality. The Little Prince tenders a philosophical resignation; The Prince triggers a rebellious desire to reinvent political order. But it heartens me immensely that in this imperfect world that we live in the two books are often thought as being one and the same.

REQUEST FOR COMMENTS/SUGGESTIONS
Language and National Identity in Burma
Justin Watkins (SOAS, London) and U Saw Tun (NIU, DeKalb)

We have been asked to prepare a chapter on Language in Nationalism in Burma/Myanmar for a book "Language and National Identity in Asia" to be published by Oxford University Press.

We are keen that our piece should be as inclusive as possible and are writing to a broad constituency of people with Burma connections to ask if there are any useful pieces of information, or facts, or comments, or sources of information which you would like to share as we prepare to write the chapter.

We are interested in topics including, but not limited to the following:

- conflict or competition between languages in Burma
- situations where different languages are used in different domains of life
- any links, perceived or actual, between language use and personal identity
- individual accounts of the use of several languages
- nationalism and language use
- the relative status of different languages, or Burmese and other languages
- the use of Burmese compared to other languages, both in public and in private
- languages which are not indigenous to Burma - Chinese and Indian languages, etc.
- languages and the law; languages and human rights; languages and education; languages and administration
- recent or predicted changes in language use
- sources of statistics or analyses of language use

Please submit your suggestions, concerns and comments - long or short - to Justin Watkins at jw2@soas.ac.uk, and please include the word "Nationalism" in the subject line of your e-mail. While we will be extremely grateful for all comments we receive, we cannot, of course, promise to represent all views in the chapter we write. All comments will remain confidential and anonymous, unless you prefer otherwise.

Many thanks
Justin Watkins and U Saw Tun

Dr Justin Watkins, Lecturer in Burmese, School of Oriental and African
Studies, London WC1H 0XG

http://www.soas.ac.uk/SouthEastAsia/Burmese
AHRB Wa Dictionary project, http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/wadict/

GMA's much-heralded platform is here.

Fact: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer
Newsbreak reports that according to the government's own Family Income and Expenditures Survey (Fies), the net incomes of the top two deciles of the population grew by an average of 18.5 percent, while the net incomes of the bottom five deciles fell an average of 55 percent. The middle three deciles saw incomes grow by about 12 percent since 1997. In short, the poor are getting poorer; the rich are geeting richer.

As if this uneven distribution of growth were not bad enough, Newsbreak further reports that consumer trends seem to point out out that the Philippine middle class is actually shrinking:

Yolanda Villanueva Ong, chief executive of advertising agency Campaigns and Gray, believes that the middle class is getting smaller both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total population. "This is being borne out in consumer and advertising trends. Clients who sell products that cater to middle-income consumers have noticed a decline in their sales over the years. Hence you see them increasingly rolling out products and variants aimed at the lower end, or mass market."

Ready for the real shocker?

Today some eight million Filipino citizens are living and working abroad. With the domestic middle class estimated at about 10 percent of the 80-million population, one can say that roughly half of the Philippines’ entire middle class lives outside the country.

Perhaps this is the reason why our politics is still under the quagmire of, pace Joma Sison, semi-feudalism: our middle class is abroad.

When Aristotle praised the median virtues of the middle classes two thousand years ago, he never said anything about their being overseas.

Songs of protest by RJ Jacinto
Critics of EDSA 2 say it was nothing more than a huge party by the country's snooty upper and midddle classes. RJ Jacinto's music was one of the major reasons EDSA 2 was such a blast. Had there been more space, there probably would have been some dancing on the street. You can download those EDSA 2 songs here (thanks to Sassy Lawyer for the link). The link also provides new songs such as Angarapata, Fernando and Disqualification Time.

The promise of coco diesel
The first time I heard about coco diesel sometime in 2002, I thought it was quack science, up there with water fuel, but apparently it is real science and had been such for decades. BusinessWorld reports that even though the oil companies do not want to sell coco diesel, the government is still pushing through with its plan to make the use of a 1% coco-methylester (CME) diesel blend for government vehicles compulsory. Government offices will be required to make their own mixture of CME and regular diesel. The report further says that:

Government agencies without fuel tank facilities will blend its CME requirements by pouring in the required volume of CME into the vehicles before refueling with the corresponding amount of diesel.

To achieve a 1% CME blend, government agencies will be required to pour 50.5 milliliters of CME for every five liters of diesel put in the vehicles.

Exact what is coco diesel and how is it produced ? Coconut methyl ester or CME is derived from trans-esterification of coconut oil in the presence of methanol and catalyst, such as caustic soda. to produce a crude glycerin that burns in diesel engines without much modification.

Is the mixing of CME and diesel worth the trouble? The product has huge potential, I gather. Coco diesel has a sulphur content of 0.05 per cent compared with regular diesel's 0.2 per cent. It complies with the sulphur content regulation for engine fuel set for the year 2004 by the the Clean Air Act. The Philippine Coconut Authority also claims that coco diesel has no carcinogenic compounds like benzene, paraffin and aromatics.

Environmental good points aside, coco diesel also has the potential to revive the country's moribund coconut industry and augment the livelihood of some 2 million coconut farmers and their families.

First anniversary and a free book
I almost forgot about it, but while perusing this blog's archives I found out that today--April 6-- is, in fact, my first anniversary in blogosphere. Today being an anniversary, I got to thinking about my reasons for writing the blog in the first place.

After Napster's peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing program was terminated by the US courts, I realized that there was a war going on, a war that will decide who will inherit the internet. On one side are the people who believe in the revolutionary power of free and democratic sharing of information. On the other side--the enemies of the open internet--are those who would like to appropriate the web for commercial purposes, people who would like to transform the internet into one gigantic shopping catalogue.

The enemies of the open internet have scored significant victories especially in the field of copyright protection. They were able to shoot down Napster, for one. The record companies in the US are also suing one by one those who share music files online. News last week was that they have even started suing people in Europe.

What the record companies is trying to do is wrest control of the internet from its users. They want to end the free sharing of materials in the internet that is subversive of the current market capitalist paradigm. Some magazines and newspapers (Wall Street Journal being on the lead) began withholding their internet contents to non-subscribers. If big business would have its way, there would be nothing more to hyperlink to in blogs.

This brings me to my reason for blogging. I want to contribute in this silent war of who will inherit the internet in however a small way. I believe that the internet belongs to people who want to share, and only secondarily to people who want to charge.

There are reasons to be optimistic as there seems to be a turning of the tide in this war. A Canadian court last week declared that downloading music files is not illegal under Canadian law. British pop star George Michael has also announced that henceforth his songs would be distributed in the internet free of charge. The Gutenberg online library has recently celebrated the 10,000th book it is freely distributing in the net. The trailblazer Napster also been replaced by Kazaa and Grokster, which are immune to legal persecution as they maintain no central database of files.

The Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT) has also thrown its weight in support of an open internet . Hoping to inspire other people to freely share their knowledge, the MIT launched its OPENCOURSE website, where it is sharing to the whole world all of its course materials--absolutely free, without exorbitant Ivy League tuition fees. MIT President Charles M. Vest hopes " that in sharing MIT’s course materials...we will inspire other institutions to openly share their course materials, creating a worldwide web of knowledge that will benefit mankind." Websites like MIT's are oases for aspiring autodidacts throughout the world. In the future of the open internet, people like FPJ cannot excuse their ignorance by pleading their having dropped out of school.

Another historic victory for the expansion of liberty in the internet is the publication of Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture. It is the first book in history that is published by a major publisher (Penguin Books) and at the same time distributed freely in the internet (click here for your free copy). In the book (I have just began reading it), Lessig (who incidentally also writes a blog here) talks of a free culture:

[W]e come from a tradition of “free culture”—not“free” as in “free beer” (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the freesoftware movement), but “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections.” A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

We must all fight for the internet's free culture and maintain its world wide web of peers. I'll post more on Lessig's book as soon as I finish it.

Free Muslim Mindanao?
Manuel Quezon III in his blog opines that Muslim Mindanao cannot be successfully integrated into the Philippine nation-state and must therefore be set free. According to Quezon:

...the history of Mindanao itself, and the history of Muslim minorities in other nations, makes it impossible to integrate Muslims into a Filipino state. We have tried since the 1930s but only turned ourselves into little brown imperialists in the process.

Muslim Mindanao should be given independence, with an indemnity to set any such state firmly on its feet, and then securely cordoned off.

Resty Odon of the Expectorants also agrees. IMHO though independence for Mindanao is no longer a workable solution-although admittedly it once was. The Christian populations in most Mindanao provinces are burgeoning. Carving a Muslim Mindanao nation-state would be so demographically challenging for our legislators. Only Sulu, I have heard it said, remains demographically pure.

Were there to be a referendum among Muslims on self-determination, there is also reason to believe that the choice for integration/status quo would prevail. The SWS in 2000 had a survey on national attitudes and a look at the attitude of the subsample of Muslims in that survey bodes well for further integration rather than independence.

In that particular SWS survey, 75% of the Muslim subsample said that they were Filipinos first of all, while only 18% said that they were an ethnic group first of all. Furthermore, the survey showed that it was mainly the non-Muslims, NOT the Muslims, who self-identify as ethnic members rather than Filipinos.

The above finding of the SWS cannot de considered conclusive since the Muslim respondents were merely a small subsample, but, as Mahar Mangahas put it, it shows that Filipino Muslims "do not consider themselves any more separate from Filipinos in general than, say, Visayan-speaking Filipinos do."

John Kerry in Manila
The humorist P.J. O'Rourke has a contribution to the latest issue of the Weekly Standard recalling John Kerry's 1986 wimp-out in the Philippines. John Kerry was in Manila in 1986 as a member of the American delegation tasked by then American President Ronald Reagan to observe the snap elections. According to P.J. O'Rourke, who was also in Manila that time covering for the Rolling Stone, Kerry did nothing when Mrs. Bea Zobel, upon the suggestion of O'Rourke and Village Voice's Joe Conason, asked him for help after the walkout of some thirty COMELEC computer operators. O'Rourke writes that:

He [Kerry] was ushered into an area that had been cordoned off from the press and the crowd and where the computer operators were sitting. To talk to the women, all he would have had to do was raise his voice. Why he was reluctant, I can't tell you. I can tell you what any red-blooded representative of the U.S. Government should have done. He should have shouted, "If you're frightened for your safety, I'll take you to the American embassy, and damn the man who tries to stop me." But all Kerry did was walk around like a male model in a concerned and thoughtful pose.

O'Rourke says that the manila 1986 episode was characteristic of Kerry, having his cake and eating it too. Not wanting to displease the pro-Marcos Reagan, Kerry simply watched as events unfolded, going the convenient way of the wimp. O'Rourke concludes:

Just as today Kerry is brave sailor/bold war protester; foe of Saddam/friend of Hans Blix; political underdog/entitled nominee; big government liberal/corporate tax-cutting conservative; rider of Harleys/marrier of Heinz; and, incidentally, still a real jerk.

Perhaps, Kerry was a jerk. So is W Bush now. Would that Hillary run.

PCIJ Writing Fellowships
The Center offers fellowships for investigative reportage to full-time reporters, freelance journalists and academics. Their reports are syndicated in major Philippine newspapers and magazines or aired in broadcast stations. Reports by fellows who are staff reporters are published or aired exclusively by the agencies they work for.

PCIJ stories make an impact. Well-researched and well-documented, these reports have contributed to a deeper understanding of raging issues, from politics to the environment, from health and business to women and the military. Some of these reports have prodded government action on issues like corruption, public accountability and environmental protection.

Applicants for investigative reporting fellowships are required to submit a written proposal on the project they wish to undertake. The proposal should contain the following information: the rationale for the project; the research methodology the proponent intends to use; an estimate of expenses, including out-of-town travel, that the writer will incur; and a timetable.

The Center's board of editors evaluates proposals based on their timeliness, impact and relevance. The proponent's competence and integrity as a journalist are also considered.

PCIJ shoulders travel and research expenses, and in some instances, also video or radio production costs. The Center also pays writer's and director's fees. It can extend funding of as much as P30,000 for each project proponent. In very exceptional circumstances, it can provide as much as P50,000, excluding production costs. Research and
editorial support, including editorial supervision, will be provided by the Center. Proponents are required to report regularly to PCIJ.

The Center accepts proposals for fellowships on the following areas of concern: democratization, economic reform, environment, local governance, women, poverty and development, government and leadership, politics and power, the administration of justice, agriculture and agrarian reform, human rights, the military, insurgency, mass media and education.

New Day Books for graduates
New Day Publishers, pioneer Filipiniana and religious publishing house, is treating the graduates of 2004 a wide array of titles at 40 to 70 percent discount on regular books and other titles recently published.

These include Francis Warren’s "Iranun and Balangingi," Azucena Uranza's "A Passing Season," Dery's "History of Inarticulate," and other award-winning books that will make graduates more knowledgeable of the country’s rich heritage

Also up for are inspirational reading materials, the Women Write Series penned by women authors, cook books, insightful anecdote books, literary fiction, as well as comic books by the country’s leading cartoonists namely Larry Alcala (Mang Ambo), Tonton Young (Pupung), Pol Medina (Pugad Baboy) and Edgar Dionela (Simo).

Promo runs until supply lasts. For inquiries please call New Day Publishers at 928-8046; 927-5982 or email at newdayorders@edsamail.com.ph

Justice for Mark Welson Chua, Bayani
Buried beneath the more salacious stories in today's papers was the conviction of one of the four suspects in the brutal murder case of Mark Welson Chua. Chua was the UST ROTC cadet who was killed in 2001 right inside the UST Department of Military Science and Tactics after he and other cadets exposed the corruption and bribery in the ROTC on the university's campus paper.

Manila RTC Judge Romulo A. Lopez sentenced the suspect Cadet Lt. Col. Arnulfo B. Aparri, Jr. to die by lethal injection for his participation in the crime. The charges against the other accused -- cadet Lt. Cols. Michael Von Rainard Manangbao and Eduardo E. Tabrilla, and former cadet officer Paul Joseph Tan -- were archived because they are yet to be apprehended.

One will remember that it was the death of Chua which triggered the massive call for the abolition of the ROTC. Students now have an option whether to undergo military training or community service through the NSTP program.

Waiting for the OFW vote
UAE's Khaleej Times has a short feature on the Philippine labor diaspora, and it reminds one of the gory details of our economy's masssive failure to generate jobs:

The Foreign Department reports that as of December 2003, there were 5,345,700 Filipinos documented as working abroad, with over half a million more working illegally.

The article points out that the OFWs are, in a way, fashioning the country's middle class, and a consolidation of their inchoate political power can reinvent--perhaps temper-- the country's elite dominance.

The OFWs indeed have the potential to reinvent the political terrain, but they didn't take to overseas voting that well. If I remember correctly, there were about only 300,000 Filipino OFWS who registered to vote abroad, a trickle by any standard, dismally insufficient to tilt the balance of power in a national election. We would have to wait for another election other than the coming one in May to see if there would emerge an OFW vote.

Web prowl
The Beijing Review reports on the burgeoning expat communities in China. For those who are philosophically inclined, papers from the recently concluded Columbia/NYU graduate Conference in Philosophy are now available online. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post has a short review essay of a biography of the pianist Glenn Gould, celestially famous for his Bach's Goldberg Variations.

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR EDITED BOOK
THE CELL PHONE:
HISTORY, TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE

Edited by Anandam P. Kavoori and Noah Arceneaux
Dept of Telecommunications
Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
The University of Georgia, Athens, Ga 30602

The Cell phone presents itself at the periphery of contemporary discourse about media and culture. TV cops use it as they rush to crime scenes, teenagers use it to connect with their peers, terrorists are traced through calls made on their cell phones, extra-marital affairs draw sustenance from them. Such images, however, do not do justice to the central role that cell phones have begun to play in contemporary society. Cell phones lack the hype of the Internet but are fast approaching the cultural impact of a mass medium. They have begun to shape how we communicate; their use has created new forms of media-centered relations; and in the marketplace they have begun to influence patterns of media ownership and acquisition. In the developing world ­the cell phone is often the first phone for the urban poor. In their intersection with other technologies­text messaging, the World Wide Web and digital photography/video­Cell phones have changed how we look at an omnipresent cultural technology­the “telephonee.

This edited book seeks papers that examines three overarching issues­History, Technology and Culture-- as they relate to the Cell Phone. Papers from all theoretical (social scientific, cultural, critical, ethnographic, historical) perspectives are welcome. Of special interest are papers dealing with the impact of the Cell Phone in the developing
world and with issues of identity politics­race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality.

Papers may address one or more of these questions. These are suggested research questions, not a complete template. You may wish to add to these.

History:
When did Cell Phones develop into a mass medium? What are the economic, political and institutional factors that have had a major impact on the Cell phone industry? What has been the relation between the history of the Internet and the Cell Phone? What is the future of the Cell Phone as compared to the history of other media technologies? What has been the trajectory of Cell Phone use in the developing world as compared to the West?

Technology:
What is the technology of the Cell Phone? How did it evolve and intersect with other media technologies (Internet, Phone, Web, Texting)? How have the design and architecture of Cell phones (size, texture, features, color) influenced their growth? What are the current technological limits and possibilities of the Cell Phone? How might Cell Phone technologies grow and change in the next decade? How has it impacted minority cultures and the developing world?

Culture:
What are the shifts in cultural sensibility that the Cell phone represents? What kinds of normative and interactive models for communication does the Cell phone represent? What forms of mass mediated relationships and Identity politics does the Cell Phone configure? How do the aesthetics of Cell phones impact behavior--especially youth and business culture? How have Cell phones changed the structuring of daily life? How do cell phones intersect with issues with issues of identity-politics, especially those of race, gender and sexuality. What future impact can the Cell phone have as it merges with web and other technologies? What is the impact of the cell phone in developing countries? With changing Geo- politics?

The deadline for paper abstracts is September 1, 2004.

Please send your queries via email to the corresponding editor, Noah Arceneaux at noahax@uga.edu or via mail to Dr. Anandam P. Kavoori, Associate Professor, Dept of
Telecommunications, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602.

Blogs
Noam Chomsky has started his own blog, while I wonder what happened to Bill Clinton's plan to put up his own last year. Perhaps he could not choose among the possible titles of the blog, some of those suggested were: Oral Issues, Where's Monica, The Meaning of Is, Wag the Blog, The View from Under the Desk.

Silent plague
While more and more young people are taking the habit of smoking, 75 tubercular Filipinos die everyday. Manila Times reports that the Philippines is the eight in the world with the most cases of tuberculosis.

I suspect the situation is even worse. Almost every month I buy a bottle of supplements ( to prolong my corporeal existence before I join the Dark Side), and almost each time I am at the drugstore there is someone beside me buying TB prescription: isoniazid, rifampicin, pyrazinamide, ethambutol etc. (I know I should not but I always cannot help looking over the shoulder of people buying prescription drugs; it's my vice.)

One friend who is a social worker in Tondo also told me that in their medical aid missions, a disproportionately large amount of cases involves TB. The tubercular people's medications in Tondo also have to be personally supervised that they take the proper dosage because, according to her, most people simply re-sell their drugs once the primary TB symptoms subside without completing the six-month complete medication.

One matrona lady at St Luke's was also threatening to sue her doctor for medical malpractice, alleging that the doctor gave her TB shots. The lady could not fathom, for the life of her, how she could have possibly gotten the disease, unless the allergy shots she received from her doctor carried the bacteria. After great investigation and medical soul-searching, it turned out that that patient's septuagenarian mother has TB. She therefore got it from her mother.

The above incident is disturbing because it means that in some households TB is already present but is unrecognized despite consulations with doctors.

How could the patients be so uninformed ? Because most doctors are so delicate that they seldom have the heart, especially with TB cases, to be matter-of-factly when dealing with clients. Doctors will show the X-ray and simply issue prescriptions, and that's all about it--sometimes not even an advice to cut down on smoking.

TB severely strains our labor force as TB is wont to attack people at their prime earning capacity (40-65). It also severely drains the income of many Filipino households.

TB is a plague, and we all wallow in ignorance about its perniciousness.

Privatizing irresponsibility
The government and the Maynilad are denying it ardently with all the corporate poker face they can muster, but as this BusinessWorld story confirms, the long and short of the deal is that the Lopez group is ipso facto relieved of its debt burden:

In Amendment No. 2 to the concession agreement, a copy of which was obtained by BusinessWorld, the state-run Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) effectively released Benpres Holdings Corp. from its commitment to guarantee payment of at least $47 million in Maynilad debts in case of default.

Under the proposed bridge banks term sheet, or Annex F-1 of Amendment No. 2, the new Maynilad shareholders will pay $39 million of the $47 million in seven years at concessional rates of between 1% and 3% over prevailing interest rates. The $8 million will paid within a year at 1% over prevailing rates.

"If these terms are not acceptable to any or all of the bridge banks, then payments to non-accepting banks shall be held by Maynilad in trust for ... Benpres if any or all non-accepting bridge banks recover from Benpres pursuant to Benpres' guarantee," the proposed term sheet provides.

The deal is therefore a bailout in whatever Wittgenstein language game. The people must have water, especially during elections, and at the same time the Lopezes must not lose money. How to reconcile the two? Bill the republic.

The government cannot help but bail out this particular market failure courtesy of Kapamilya because 1) the Lopezes have a humungous clout and, more importantly 2) Maynilad's clients cannot biologically afford to live without water.

This controversy should force us to rethink the wisdom of privatizing utilities in the first place.

The expressed motive for privatization of the utilities--and privatization, in general-- is increased economic inefficiency, with the extension of private ownership and market relations seen as the means to achieve that end. And in most cases, the logic of privatization holds.

Private businessmen, goaded by their rational desire for profits, run businesses more smoothly, efficiently and effectively than government bureaucrats. And with businessmen competing with each other, the result, the logic of privatization holds, is lower rates for better sevices for the consumers. With privatization, Thomas Borcherding's "Bureacratic Rule of Two", "Removal of an activity from the private to the public sector wiil double its unit cost of production," is supposed to be reversed.

So what went wrong in this privatization of Maynilad?

The water distribution was privatized alright, but the government monopolist agency was simply replaced by another monopolist private agent in the private sector. The privatization in this case did not lead to efficiency. What in effect happened was a privatization of irresponsibility. The element of healthy business competition that directs Adam Smith's invisible hand, was not there.

Maynilad has no competitors in the area; there is no other competitor to deliver service if Maynilad were to self-destruct. Public interest therefore, especially in the summer time, cannot allow Maynilad to fail because otherwise the people would simply die of dehydration. Thus, we have the bailout.

There are two other disturbing things about the bailout:

1) Apparently even after the government bails out Maynilad, it would not acquire direct management of the corporation. Exactly who will control Maynilad after the bailout remains a secret.

2) The partner of Benpres, the French water management firm Ondeo Services, cannot help but cry foul because it has already honored some of its Maynilad guarantees. The bailout would free the Lopezes from obligations but, "under the compromise deal, Ondeo will still be required to honor its outstanding guarantees on Maynilad's debts. These obligations include an undertaking to pay the $50 million that MWSS will draw next month from the performance to partly answer for PhP8 billion in unpaid concession fees."

The bailout gives capitalism a bad rentseeking name in this country. Abroad, it gives us a repuation for being bad business partners.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, No Night Market:
Then the Chinese said with his eyes fixed on a broken roof tile, "Why does anyone of us have to die alone? Be born alone? And live alone in a world full of people? And when we love someone and they love us--," he knelt and peered through the door to father's solitary body, "as our late friend did, for instance, why do we have to part with them in death? Alone. Alone. Alone. Born alone. One person. Then another. Why can't we be born together and die together? I wish the world was as warm, noisy and bright as the night market is."

CSSP Campaign for Resources
The UP College of Social Sciences and Philosophy is having a fund drive for several projects it is undertaking. Rich and generous alumni are requested to contribute. Click here for the details on how to make a gift.

Miriam strikes again
Miriam Defensor Santiago is blasting Boots Anson-Roa and Amina Rasul for filing a meritless petition to declare GMA as resigned before the Supreme Court. She said Rasul and Roa should be jailed instead so they could at least read more about the Penal Code.

There is simply no one to match Miriam's katarayan, not even GMA's. I remember when Miriam showed her legs on TV and said they were more shapely than a certain man's she was jousting then ( I cannnot remember the name of that official.)

I know not a few people look forward to seeing Pilar Pilapil in the Senate. Imagine how things would turn out if Pilar Pilapil were to be elected senator and engage her fellow Bisaya Miriam in a bout of invective hurling. Now that is what we would call first-class political entertainment.

The Philippine ruling class
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism invites you to the launching of

THE RULEMAKERS
How the Wealthy and Well-born Dominate Congress

and The Ties that Bind CD-ROM

24 March 2004, 5 p.m.
Balay Kalinaw, U.P. Diliman
Quezon City


---------------[ About the Book )------

The Rulemakers
How the Wealthy and Well-born Dominate Congress

by Sheila S. Coronel, Yvonne T. Chua, Luz Rimban, and Booma B. Cruz

THIS book tells the story of the Philippine legislature by examining the men and women who make up that body. It looks at their demographic characteristics (age, gender, education, profession), their assets and sources of wealth, and also their family lineage.

What we found was troubling, but hardly new: Philippine legislators constitute a select and exclusive segment of society. They are richer, older, better educated, and better connected than the rest of us. The great majority of them are also part of families whose members have been in public office for two or more generations.

This book also shows how lawmakers have employed their powers to further enrich themselves and entrench their families in power. The powers to make laws, to conduct legislative inquiries, to examine the national budget, and to vet presidential appointments have been used by legislators to get benefits for themselves, their allies, and their kin.

Book: P450
CD-ROM: P250
Book and CD-ROM package launching price: P540.00

The mystery of the Easter Island
Speculators believe the giant statues were sculpted by aliens stranded on earth. Now my own curiosity can rest: Jared Diamond explains in a review essay for the New York Review of Books that the statues were actually made by real people paying homage to their chiefs. Diamond points out that Easter Island was once a rainforest, where the long ropes used to haul the statues came from.

The island suffered massive deforestation sometime in the sixteenth century as the different clans one-upped each other in building the more garish and bigger statues. Because of the deforestation and the concomitant decline in the animal species in the island, islanders practiced cannibalism for lack of food.

No tree remains on Easter Island today:

The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields.

Diamond also writes how the Easter Island crisis serves as a caveat for the rest of us of how a society can be torn apart by environmental degradation:

The Easter Islanders' isolation probably also explains why their collapse, more, perhaps, than the collapse of any other pre-industrial society, haunts readers and visitors today. The parallels between Easter Island and the modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter's eleven clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, or to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future.

The return of the GI babies ?
UP Prof. Carolina Hernandez made some remarks yesterday about the need to have US bases again to bolster the nation's security, notwithstanding the rap that Spain got for its support for the US.

The reports by the Businessworld and the Manila Times yesterday were short and did not say whether the remarks were part of a formal talk or were merely offhand comments. Today though took Prof Hernandez to task and made a stinging shooting down of the idea.

Personally, I, too, don't see how the US bases could possibly help in countering terrorism. As Today pointed out, the US bases would only make us a hot spot, a la Spain, to be targeted and punished for our support in propping up the Great Satan.

Terrorist attacks are not deterred by great firepower. Otherwise nobody would have dared touch New York, bastion of the greatest military power known to mankind.

Terrorist attacks are characterized by stealth carried out by a handful of personnel. Cold War deterrence no longer works. What we need is a greater capability to do intelligence work--and in this aspect the Americans are pathetically ill-equipped and are in no position to lecture their Filipino counterparts.

What remains of our AFP admittedly needs reinforcement and training, but are not the Balikatan exercises enough for that ?

The bases that the US used before and left are yet to be cleaned up. Hundreds have gone sick; many have died of leukemia. The formers bases have put to risk the health security of not a few Filipinos. If it is security that the government and Prof Hernandez want, the more appropriate idea would be for pushing the Philippine government to sue at the International Court of Justice for the US to clean up the radioactive waste it left in its former bases.

THe US cleaned up its mess in Germany. Why not in the Philippines ?

We are too polite and unmercenenary in our dealings with the US; that is why we always get shortchanged. Western-trained mostly in US universities, our leaders are bad hagglers. Look at Turkey: they bled the Americans for every dollar, was initially rebuffed but was simply, the US later realized, too important to be left in the cold. We to, like Turkey, are simply too important the US cannot afford to ignore us. And besides if the US ignores us, we can always suck up to China. Let us see how the US State Department will deal with that.

The one thing nice about new US basing arrangements is that we would have more mestizas and mestizos to audition for Starstruck. The US bases, seen in this light, has more to do with psychic security than national security. On the other hand, do closer ties with China potentially mean more F4-like bands ? The Filipino people would be practically at the end of its wits were the debate on national secutiy ever to hit the mainstream.

On knowing when to quit and hit the road
Bill Moyers is quitting NOW after the US November elections. VP Guingona may be able to relate with Moyers's farewell open letter:

You don't want to quit altogether. You keep thinking of those lines from Tennyson's "Ulysses": How dull it is to pause, to make an end/ to rust unburnished, not to shine in use.

But slowing down is not quitting. And you also think about the legendary black pitcher Satchel Paige, who spent most of his career in what was then called the Negro Baseball League. By the time the racial barriers were relaxed, he was, as baseball measures the life span, an old man. That didn't stop him from doing the one thing he knew how to do well – he just kept on pitching, and pitching, and pitching.

When a reporter asked him, "How old are you?" He replied: "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?" One day, though, he found out, and even Satchel Paige handed the ball to a younger man and left the mound for good. Knowing when is the trick; timing is what counts.

Timing is what counts. Those who quit fast, died young are the people who loom large in the historical imagination: Jesus Christ, Alexander the Great, Evita Peron, Martin Luther King Jr, Cesare Borgia, Che Guevara. Emilio Aguinaldo arguably faded in Philippine history not so much because he betrayed Bonifacio but because he grew old and never died young, as all good historical figures should do. The astute Mahathir Mohamad understands this cardinal rule: if you want to secure a page in history better quit fast lest people get bored with you.

Job openings
ABC 5 is looking for news reporters. Submit your resume personally: 762 Quirino Highway, San Bartolome, Novaliches, Quezon City.

Frenzy is looking for 15 talents (aged 18-25). Text INTRSTD to 0917-8231111 to get a schedule for screening starting March 22.

Roco on family planning
I've seen Roco prevaricating and being evasive on the issue of family planning on Debate on Channel 7. ( Lacson, in contrast, is admirably straightforward in pushing for family planning using methods prohibited by the Catholic Church. )

I do not understand the need for Roco to be vague on this particular topic for fear of suffering a ballot backlash. Nobody--well, except perhaps the clergy and the Opus Dei--takes it against a presidential candidate tha fact that he supports artificial methods of curtailing the reproductive propensity of the populace. It is only among a few of our middle classes and the religious rich ( too minuscule a segment of our population to warrant attention) that being pro-life counts for something.

Let's face it: we are shy to directly tell it to our priests but, deep inside our sinful selves, we couldn't care less about the natural method. It is tedious and some people don't even have a pocket calendar.

The priests and the nuns are celibate. Just because they are non-reproductive doesn't mean we have to compensate for them. Roco should give a clear and determinate stand on the issue.

Lord of the Rings
BBC reports that The Lord of the Rings is being turned into a West End musical. The net is buzzing with suggestions for possible songs to be included in the musical:

1) ‘I’m gonna wash that orc right out of my hair’ (Legolas)

2) ‘You’re the One Ring that I want’ (Sauron in Act I, then Gollum in Act II, and Frodo, Gollum and Sauron in Act III)

3) ‘People will say we’re in love’ (Frodo/Sam duet, Act II, theme echoed by Gimli and Legolas during Battle of Pelennor Fields)

4) ‘City with the Tree on Top’ (Gandalf’s arrival at Minas Tirith)

5) ‘How do I solve this problem, my dear Grima?’ (Theoden introduction)

6) Gollum’s Act III showstopper, ‘Memorieses’.

7) Frodo to Gollum: 'I don't know how to club him.'

8) Where do we go from here? ( The final parting of the fellowship at the Grey Havens).

Volunteer for NAMFREL
Click here for the Ateneo call for NAMFREL volunteers.

Web prowl
Wired magazine profiles Patrick Moore, Greenpeace co-founder-cum-eco traitor, whom former Greenpeace Director Paul Watson called "a corporate whore, an eco-Judas, a lowlife bottom-sucking parasite who has grown rich from sacrificing environmentalist principles for plain old money." The Hubble Space website offers the deepest portrait of the universe ever achieved by mankind. Read an excerpt of Chalmer Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books; and London: Verso).

How could he?
Guingona has been lost to the Dark Side. He has joined the KNP and has given his support to FPJ's bid for the presidency.

In exchange, FPJ made Guingona an adviser. Perhaps realizing that his civil society friends would not look too kindly on this latest move, Guingona has resigned his civil society positions. Guingona explained his proselytization:

"I do so mainly because almost everyone agrees that the nation must change, that the socio-economic downturn must reverse, that jobs be generated, poverty uplifted, and the cauldron of corruption be stifled by example and a consistent system, not only to prevent but also to hold accountable those responsible, no matter how low or high they may be."

Guingona lost faith in GMA; there is no reason why the same thing should not happen with FPJ. It must be hard growing old with a broken heart.

Rejoinders
The conservative Andrew Sullivan debates the conservative David Frum on the point of same-sex marriage. Also, here is a critique of Alan Dershowitz's case for torture.

Bad presidents
Tony Lopez, in his column essay provocatively entitled Set Erap Free, asks: Why do we have so many bad presidents? Why is it that only one has been imprisoned?

Yes, why indeed when all indications point to the conclusion that Estrada was hardly sui generis?

Because Estrada had the temerity to flaunt all standards of political decency. He was guilty of underestimating the political value of hypocrisy, which has served his predecessors and successors quite well.

Hypocrisy is very useful in a democracy. With hypocriisy, public officials don't get hauled off to jail, and the people don't get sleepless fidgeting and thinking about how abominable the government is. Estrada had to go not so much because he was corrupt but because he flaunted the values of our constitutional democracy so openly. Had he successfully hang on to office, those values would have lost significant hold on the consciousness of the young people who may someday assume public office themselves.

Our other officials are probably equally or more corrupt. But as a polity we can afford to ignore them because we do not quite know about their corruption for sure. We can give them the benefit of the doubt. With Estrada, however, the impeachment trial showed us almost every sordid detail (Edgardo Espiritu left out the smuggling part though). His betrayal of the public trust loomed large in the imagination of the nation; to ignore them would be tantamount to repudiating the values of a liberal democratic government that EDSA 1 secured.

Best films of 2003
The Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle

invites you to

the 14th Annual Circle Citations for Distinguished Achievement in Film for 2003 and Sine Sipat: Recasting Roles and Images—Stars, Awards and Criticism

Friday, 12 March 2004, 2 p.m.
Faculty Center Conference Hall
(Pulungang Recto, Bulwagang Rizal)
University of the Philippines
Roxas Avenue, UP Campus
Diliman, Quezon City

Idealism is for old people too
I almost missed reading Conrado de Quiros's column yesterday, where he defended himself against the charges that he has grown cynical through the years. De Quiros writes:

Growing older is the best way to see that life isn't as easy as you first imagined. It certainly offers a different view from 52 years than it did from 22. None of that means resigning oneself to iniquity, or absurdity, or mediocrity. Which is something I've seen in many of my peers, whether or not they've joined government. The fact that life poses more adversity than you expected is a challenge to do more, it is not an excuse to do less. Certainly, it is not a reason to agree to less.

De Quiros further adds that: The day I stop being angry is the day I become truly cynical about this country.

A few readers I know have grown tired of reading De Quiros's rants and have chosen not to read his column, because they say it only makes them feel bad. They say De Quiros does not see the good things and writes only of the bad depressing things. He has, they say, grown cynical, in his rabid criticisms of the government. All I can say is that they should probably read Manila Bulletin's main editorial if they want to feel upbeat because in it nothing untoward ever happens; life as seen by Manila Bulletin is one long procession of anniversaries, celebrations and job opportunities.

De Quiros's column has legions of fans. Some people read the Inquirer editorial page only because De Quiros writes for it.(MLQ 3's new presence is now another reason). I read his column even if it does make me feel a little despondent sometimes. Why should we not be depressed? We live in a shitty country; De Quiros's column is simply mirroring the gravity of our times.

The late US Senator William Fulbright is, I believe, the authority on this subject of political dissent and criticism. In The Arrogance of Power, Fulbright wrote: "To criticize one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment." "It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences that the country can do better than it is doing....In a democracy. dissent is an act of faith."

De Quiros is neither cynical nor immaturely idealistic. He is simply being faithful to our democracy, which some people have found convenient to ignore on their way to growing up and being adult.

A touch of star quality
What if Evita Peron were to be reborn as the wife of a Philippine presidential candidate?

I was reading a story on Raul Roco’s daring the spouses of the presidential candidates to a debate when the above question hit me. I mulled over the appropriateness of the question for some time and I thought why not? We are coming close to electing an actor president for the second time and some sectors are worried that we may be heading toward a crisis similar to Argentina's. A little imagination, you see, can lead to the question. After all, Evita's battle cry was Spartacus's: " I will come back and I will be millions. . . !"

There have been germs of populism in our history, I think, but we never had someone like Evita to bring us populism in extremis.

Estrada, the closest to a populist president that we got, gorged on Petrus wine and popped Xenical to counter his gluttony. He had populist rhetoric, but he dropped it fast because he himself probably could not stomach his phoniness. Now, some supporters of FPJ are vaguely hinting on a class conflict when they refer to the elites and the middle classes' bias toward FPJ.

The success of Estrada, despite the virulent opposition of the Catholic Church and most of the upper classes, shows that we have a viable populist thread in our political culture that can be tapped to acquire power. FPJ hopes that the same populism buoy up his candidacy. Estrada and FPJ may like to sound and act populist, but they do not have the energy to sustain the charade.

Estrada, for example, dramatically opened Malacanang to people with requests and needs--for hospitalization,burial, tuition fees, etc. His staff entertained a long queu of people asking the president for help. But a stampede ensued and one died, and Estrada scrapped the whole idea altogether. Evita had the same long queus and, unlike Estrada, she personally was at the end of those queus granting the diverse requests of her descamisados. She entertained those queus as long as she was physically able to. Estrada's staff had one day of inconvenience and it decided to wrap up.

Exactly what is the of the point of this incoherent rant? I think our political culture has a germ of Peron-style populism. Our political history therefore has a great vacuum that is aching to be filled. Some people think the Philippines is long ripe for a class war. We just need someone with a sharp tongue and an ax to grind against the country's privileged. Evita was very good in instilling hate, resentment and indignation. She said that "just as some persons have a special tendency to feel beauty differently and more intensely, than do people in general, and therefore become poets or painters or musicians, I have a special inherent tendency to feel injustice with unusual and painful intensity."

So what if Eva Peron were to be reborn as the wife of a Philippine presidential candidate? Was it Lenin or Trotsky who said something about power just lying on the streets waiting to be picked up?

On second thought, Malacanang doesn't seem to have a good balcony. Well, a populist worth his or her salt can always improvise.

Vote ko 'to!: Kababaihan sa Halalan 2004
The WD 210 class under Prof. Rosalinda Pineda-Ofreneo is holding a forum to discuss the women's agenda in the coming May 2004 elections. Panel speakers are Kalayaan Constantino from Abanse Pinay!; Risa Hontiveros from Akbayan; and Malou Turalde-Jacobe from Gabriela. Former Senator Leticia Ramos -Shahani will be the panel reactor.

Vote ko 'to!: Kababaihan sa Halalan 2004 will be held on 15 March 2004 from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.at the conference room of the old CSWCD building.

Here is the tentative program:

Tentative Programme
2:00 - 2:15 - registration and introductions
2:15 - 3:15 - presentations from Abanse Pinay!, Akbayan, and Gabriela
3:15 - 4:00- reaction from former Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani
4:00 - 4:45 - open forum
4:45 - 5:00 - acknowledgements and closing remarks


Join us and let's all build the women's agenda.

For more information, contact:
Mavic Cabrera-Balleza
Tel: 928-1956 local 204
Mobile: 0917-527-6664
E-mail: mavic@isiswomen.org

FPJ Superstar
Film 102 section 2 invites you to a symposium on Mr. Fernando Poe, Jr.

entitled

From Reel to Real:
Deconstructing Da King

Videotheque, 2nd floor, University Cinema (formerly UP Film Center)
Tuesday, 9 March 2004. 1:00 - 4:00pm

with our speakers

Ms. Rina Jimenez-David
Columnist
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Dr. Eufracio Abaya
Director, Folklore Studies
College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, UP Diliman

Dr. Patrick Flores
Chair, Department of Art Studies
College of Arts and Letters, UP Diliman

Professor Julkipli MWadi
College Secretary
UP Institute of Islamic Studies

Free admission!
Open to the public. First come, first served.

For more inquiries, text or call
Gayle +639164544114
Neri +639196756281

2005 Asian Youth Fellowship Scholarship of Japan
The 2005 Asian Youth Fellowship Scholarship (AYF) of Japan is now accepting applicants.

Field of Study:

Humanities and Social Sciences in principle, such as History, Archaeology, Law, Politics, Economics, Commerce, Education, Sociology, etc, but students majoring in a study field of Engineering and Natural Sciences are also encouraged to apply.

Qualifications:

-- Applicants must be nationals of one of the following countries:

Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand or Vietnam

-- Applicants must be under 35 years of age as of April 1, 2006 (i.e. born on or after April 2, 1971)

-- Applicants must be university or college graduates.

The study area must be in the same field as the applicant has studied (or is now studying) or related one.

-- Applicants should not have Japanese language proficiency. Those who have learned Japanese language and already acquired Japanese proficiency comparable to the Japanese Proficiency Test Level 3 are excluded.

-- Good proficiency in English is required.

Term of Scholarship:

The scholarship will be granted for a period of about 14 months, in principle, from the date of arrival in Kuala Lumpur to March 2006.

After completing the AYF Program, the Japanese Government (Monbukagakusho) scholarship will be granted according to its own regulation.

Required documents may be submitted directly to the library of Japan Information and Cultural Center in the Embassy of Japan, not later than the 16th of April,2004.

Please access the AYF website for more information and to download the application form at http://www.asiaseed-institute.com/AYF

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Ph.D.
Did the president flunk her oral exams but was nevertheless given a Ph.D. degree by the UP School of Economics? The main editorial of the Daily Tribune insinuates so.

Che the revolutionary
The Christian Science Monitor has a short piece on the iconic image of Che Guevara wearing gold-starred black cap, throwing a quixotic gaze toward eternity:

"There's something about Che's face - that iconic image - which seems immediately identifiable to young people of almost any generation and almost any culture," Anderson muses. "It's the virile personification of youthful defiance against the status quo, whatever the status quo is. I don't think the consumption of Che iconography empties the vessel, because it was always thus. But there's been more to learn behind that image."

Apparently, there is a movie on Che Guevara that is coming soon, starring Benicio del Toro. So we can expect more talk--and hopefully more learning behind the image--on Che Guevara in the coming months.

Best Volunteer Experience Essay Writing Contest
Ivolunteer.ph is having an essay writing contest for volunteers who would like to share their experiences. Click here for more information.

Forging unity
It has often been pointed out by FPJ (and was duly echoed by his supporters) that political debates are unnecesssary because they only heighten the divisiveness of the nation by the candidates' differing positions. Inspired by this political wisdom from the FPJ camp, I have come up with more suggestions, patriotic that I am, on how to further unite the country:

1) Pass a law banning debates. Repeat after FPJ: debates divide the country, debates divide the country...

2) Since clamor for debates heats up during elections, we must consider banning elections altogether, or at least limiting elections to some indispensable positions.

3) Before the country can be united, our officials should be united first.

The legislative debates in our Congress are a gross manifestation of our country's divisiveness. New rules for our Congress therefore must be promulgated to see to it that our legislators are as polite to each other as possible. Differences must be aired not in the sesssion hall, but through staff.

4) Have the Department of Education pass a memorandum requiring the recitation of Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa right after the flag ceremonies in every school.

5) Let us shift to monarchy. In monarchies, the people are united behind the king, because the king, the sovereign, is the people. In a monarchy there is no room for crass debates.

Web prowl
Amy Chua writes on the perils of exporting democracy to Iraq. UP Professor Walden Bello is interviewed by the American magazine ColorLines. The Washington Post has a paean for Google's unchaining of information. Britain's Telegraph reviews Simon Blackburn's short treatise on lust, a pleading in favor of the sin.

Wanted actresses
An international co-production is looking for actresses for an independent film.

The major role requires an actress, at least 18 years old, who can pass off as someone in her early-20's. The actress has to have a light to medium body-build and not taller than 5'5". She has to be adept in communicating in both English and Tagalog. The part is of a street-smart, single-minded dreamer. She's slightly edgy but chameleon-like in that she can make herself invisible. Actress should have the range of someone like Ally Macbeal--she can go from being a quiet observer to an all out looney.

Other supporting roles are for a typical teenage girl and a senior colegiala.

The auditions will be held on March 13 & 14 at 4/F GMA-Lou Bel Bldg., cor. Chino Roces (Pasong Tamo), Bagtikan Sts., Makati City.

For registration and/or questions, please emailSOMproduction@softhome.net, or call 09209207913.

From senator to bodyguard
Sen Gringo Honasan has undergone a sudden career shift in middle age. His political fortunes have fallen so low that from being an honorable senator of the republic he is now merely a bodyguard for FPJ.

Honasan does not mind the change, Manila Times reports. The Manila Times conveyed this concern to Honasan but he shrugged it off. “I am immensely enjoying my role in securing the future president of the country,” he said.

And why should Honasan not enjoy his present job ? Like Enrile, he is simply hitching his wagon to a star.

Book launching
The Constantino Foundation for Nationalist Studies (FNS) invites you to join the commemoration of the 85th birth anniversary of the late nationalist and historian Renato Constantino. The affair will be marked by a book launching of Roberto Verzola's book entitled "Towards a Political Economy of Information: Studies on the Information Economy."

The event will be held on March 10, 5:00 pm at the University Hotel (formerly PCED) in UP Diliman. For other details, please text or call Kala at 09209084024 or Emily at 372505.

FPJ's sudden exit from Bicol
Did FPJ get such a bad welcome in Bicol that he cancelled further appointments? The sudden departure prevented the action star from attending the rallies scheduled in Virac, Catanduanes, and in Bulan, Sorsogon.

Sen. Sotto said FPJ had an emergency call. There are speculations that the sudden exit could be related to the upcoming decision by the Supreme Court on the disqualification case filed against him.

KNP, we've got a problem here
Today reports how FPJ's campaign flopped in Bicol, notwithstanding the presence of comedian Dolphy, Eddie Gutierrez and Bicolano Eddie Garcia in a motorcade to Santo Domingo, Bacacay, Malilipot and Tabaco City:

One resident said the lukewarm reception that his province mates accorded to the campaigning KNP candidates proved that Poe’s popularity and charisma do not work here.

In broken lines, people took to the streets from this town to Tabaco City, but it appeared that they got out of their homes only to get a glimpse of the actor and the members of his party.

There were those who waved and even cheered, but they were few and far between. One woman in Santo Domingo, upon seeing the passing vehicle of Jinggoy Estrada, even flashed a thumbs-down sign.

Another man also hurled back at Estrada’s party the stickers that were thrown to him.

Poe and the Koalisyon ng Nagkakaisang Pilipino candidates have been wildly cheered and even mobbed by residents in every place and province that they have visited since the start of the campaign, until they came to their sorrow here.