benign0's blog

Do we really experience reality? Think about it. Where does our personal concept of reality really exist? We think that we are in touch with our surroundings through our senses. That is of course true -- up to a point . Without minds that have been honed by years of experience turning nerve and neural signals (generated by our thought processes and our five senses whenever these capture external stimuli; i.e., light, vibration, texture, etc.) into mental constructs, there would be no experience as we, well, experience it now. Indeed, our minds piece together mental models of the world based on how it interprets data , and we "experience" those models as proxies of the real world.

Now is a great time to start a business! As evident in the raft of information "products" being churned out by that well of reliable factoids, Philippine Mainstream Media, doom and gloom sells like lechon manok in an ignorant medieval society such as the Philippines. The earthquakes that recently struck Japan and New Zealand, the prospect of a "big one" striking the Philippines itself, the spectre of radioactive clouds descending upon most of East Asia , civil war in the Arab world displacing thousands of henceforth unemployable Filipino Overseas Foreign Workers (OFWs), "super moons" unleashing super storms and even more natural disasters over the face of the planet, even alien species threatening to overrun the archipelago -- the possibilities and opportunities are infinite!

We'd like to believe that we deserve a society that treats people fairly regardless of how well they speak and write English and regardless of whether they speak it with a regional accent or not. We think, if we continue stomping our feet enough in a loud appeal to nationalist sentiment, that we could one day see a society where people with a fourth-grade level of English language proficiency are as well-regarded as those of us who are privy to the kind of thinking and knowledge that only the English language (as well as the languages of cultures with extensive track records of achievement) can efficiently convey. Unfortunately what we think we deserve is not usually what we actually get.

The Catholic Church has been progressively taking its gloves off in recent weeks as it steps up its Inquisition against the "evils" of the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill being pushed by law makers and activists alike. In a recent development marking the Church's steepest descent yet into its old Medieval habits, a local parish issued a statement where it said that it will refuse communion to people who support the RH Bill. Short of implying that people who support the RH Bill are evil, the Parish Pastoral Council of Santuario de San Jose in Mandaluyong City encouraged those who favoured the passing of the RH Bill to cleanse their soul through the Sacrament of Reconciliation .

Shocking revelation : In the United States, only 28 percent of teachers taught evolution "effectively", and that 13 percent of them advocated creationism . Unfortunate, considering that a US court had already previously held that the concept of "intelligent design" is not a science . In the landmark Kitzmiller v. Dover case, eleven parents sued a public school board in Pennsylvania for a policy that legitimised intelligent design and creationism. The outcome of the case was a triumph for science and a " defeat[...] of creationism in the courtroom "...

It has often been highlighted that to get on a sustainable course towards prosperity, Filipinos need not a change of men but a change in men. It is a social transformation that needs to come from within . An article in Scientific American provides insight on how lessons learned from the success of some past initiatives that aimed to transform thinking in people and shape their regard for what were once deeply-ingrained beliefs and mindsets could be re-applied today.

Pathetic how Filipino nurses now have to pay in order to get work experience . That indeed is one for the books -- to have to pay an employer for the privilege to work for him. It's a kind of below-zero negative unemployment ( unemployed na nga, negative pa ). Whereas the Philippines is already known for its dirt cheap labour, it now has the distinction of being a country where negative wages are paid! It'd be hilarious if it weren't so poignant.

What by most standards is already a "squeaky clean" society apparently is not enough for a people who set high standards for themselves. The Singapore Government has set a goal to make their 30,000 public rest rooms even cleaner than clean . According to the Restroom Association (Singapore) (RAS), only 500 of these public toilet facilities were "up to its standards". What are these standards that even antiseptic Singapore's toilet facilities struggle to meet?

According to a report released by the Philippine Central Bank (BSP), remittances by overseas workers to the Philippines was supposedly the "highest monthly level so far recorded". This was reported by the Inquirer.net as due to a "robust demand by foreign companies for Filipino skilled and professional workers".

There's been a lot of trumpets being blown over how the Philippines had recently surpassed India as the world's biggest remote supplier of call centre and back-end business process outsourced (BPO) services. The value proposition of such services to the market is quite clear as far as Filipinos are concerned: they are delivered on the cheap by a society awash with under-employed university graduates who speak excellent English.

It seems the government of President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III's solution to improving access to publication is to make government less accountable for public education and leave it up to big private profit-oriented corporations to educate the next generation of Filipinos.

How is the UP Law faculty's behaviour in the case of this so-called "plagiarism" row with the Philippine Supreme Court different from the way the Catholic Church is behaving with regard to reproductive health? Answer: Not too different. In both cases these are institutions tasked with guiding their flock -- the UP Law trains future lawyers, and the Catholic Church (RCC) for its part indoctrinates its Roman Catholic souls.

The venerable Big Boss of AntiPinoy.com (AP) summarised what in my opinion is the best position to take on the issue of Reproductive Health in the Philippines. He does this in a comment to a recent article on AP...

This is a photo originally posted by a certain Dan 周董 on his Facebook profile. You can access the photo at its original location in this Facebook album . It shows what looks like a gang of college students giddily posing for photos in front of the wreckage of the bus that was the scene of the recent siege that claimed the lives of eight Hong Kong tourists .

That's pretty much the question esteemed blogger Rom attempts to answer in her recent blog . She refers to the Philippine Government proposal to extend basic public education by two additional years for a total 12-year "basic education cycle" which effectively increases the financial burden of supporting kids through an additional two years of unemployed dependence (in principle) on both the average Filipino family and the public eduation system.

Apparently, an obvious safety measure flies over the heads of the average Filipino motorist, as Quezon City Councilor Jaime Borres observes that "driving with the headlights dimmed or not in the appropriate brightness is a major cause of road mishaps, especially during heavy rains at night"...

I found the following poem authored by a regular AntiPinoy.com (AP) commentor who goes by the handle Aegis-Judex . It was posted as a comment to the article "Noynoy Aquino: Being President is no longer a popularity contest". I think it encapsulates in lyric form the character of the presidency that currently imprisons Philippine society.

Simple question: Does Tagalog add value to one's marketability as a tradeable element in the global economy? That question should be the context in the evaluation of every dollar spent on classroom time devoted to Tagalog-articulated instruction.

Hardly surprising that a religious cleric like Education Secretary Armin Luistro would bumble his way through his first encounter with the Media. Organised religion has a tradition of being averse to stepping up to a serious debate on a level field when its dogma is challenged. Certainly the Roman Catholic Church is not an exception to this tradition of intolerance to free inquiry , and Luistro merely reflects this primitivist stance.

The Roman Catholic Church remains consistent to its 2000-year primitivist form continuing to hinder enlightenment by blocking the dissemination of knowledge from people who need it the most : Sex education has been integrated in subjects like Biology but, this time the Catholic Church is protesting a specific United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) project to offer it as a separate subject initially in 80 public elementary schools and 79 high schools. Education officials insist that the Church has nothing to worry about because DepEd is open to deleting portions of the teaching modules that it finds offensive.