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Wednesday, July 06, 2005
London wins the bid to host the 2012 Olympics. Inside information claims that the London and Madrid attitude was "anything but Paris."
Posted at 07:38 pm by starsi
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So this is what democracy is like
Protests mar G8 meeting as police resort to violence in Scotland. Protesters chanting: "So this is what democracy is like."
Posted at 12:16 am by starsi
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Tuesday, July 05, 2005
I have to constantly update the blog, or else it'd be hard to access blogdrive, coz the thing hangs and I have to go through the trouble of re-starting the computer. So I usually just post "a," signifying nothing, as a substitute.
Anyway, just to make it different, breaking a guideline to limit a view of my personal correspondences, I'll post a message taken from my friendster account. JJ is a bubbly and beautiful Dutch woman. The first J is short for Jorien. The friendship is platonic, ok, so don't get any wrong ideas. I don't know, the farewell is typically girlish. Imagine if I responded with *Big Hugs.* Too easy. Here it is...
Message: Hey Ceasar!
How are you?!?! I'm good, back in Holland and
working again. Had a lovely time in Sydney, hope
to get back there some day.
So what are you studying en where are you living
at the moment?
Great to hear from you,
Big kiss,
J.J.
Posted at 04:30 pm by starsi
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Monday, July 04, 2005
Previously celebrated as Philippine "Independence" Day, today is Filipino-American "Friendship" Day, built on the bones of about 600,000 Filipino revolutionaries who died when America treacherously invaded the Philippines in 1898. Filipinos then under General Aguinaldo thought the "great and benevolent" nation would be their ally. How surprised they were when their supposed allies attacked them. The invasion was a product of the professed hallucination of then US president McKinley, who heard God bless the mission to "uplift and Christianize" the "niggers" (referring to the Indios), despite 300 years of Catholicism under Spain. This was the so-called "benevolent assimilation" to take care of our "little brown brothers." Thus liberty would be introduced by the massacre of at least a sixth of the population of the Philippines then. The US has never apologized for it. And despite - or perhaps because of - the genuine friendship that the Philippines has offered the US, its imperial pride will not allow it to do so. It's been an undiscussed thorn in the two countries' relationship.
So until today, the historical lessons are being learned. Some of them: Freedom by occupation; democracy by imposing your will on a subservient state and preserving the rule of the rapacious elite - themes continued throughout the century by US policies.
Thus it's not surprising that America is the most hated and feared country in the world today, judging from world opinion polls, especially after the policies acted upon by the US government after Sept 11.
A few exceptions, of course, like in the Philippines, where you can actually see some people adulating the "American Way." Not everyone, of course. But in most countries, there's just such animosity towards US policies, translated sometimes as "Anti-Americanism." Like in Australia, where they may treat the US as allies, but have an active dislike of Americans. This reflects, for example, when an ad that runs "More refreshing than a quiet American" is actually seen as funny.
Of course, it should come with crystal clarity that ordinary Americans of the present generation should never be held accountable for historical atrocities. Sometimes I empathize with them, because ordinary citizens are blamed when they shouldn't be conflated with the foreign policies of the US government and the practices of corporations, though of course every citizen of a country has complicity with the actions of his/her government. But in truth, more and more Americans are waking up to this reality, and are acting to stop detrimental policies done in their name. To be fair, the rallies in Seattle and Washington provided an inspiration to justice movements across the globe. The recent Iraq invasion was protested even before it started, a growing sensibility to imperial policies that contradict US domestic opinion.
For the record, I myself would defend any American if they're treated badly based on such opinions. One has to discriminate between those who implement and those not totally responsible. The US has contributed much to the wealth of the world, though how it mostly does so is a topic not for the squirmish. But if we are to build a better world, understanding and clearing away of destructive acts should be firstly addressed.
Posted at 05:37 pm by starsi
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Sunday, July 03, 2005
I seldom specify people in this blog, but anyhow, in line with advocacies in politics, freedom to travel, world affairs and other non-profound stuff, I include science education as a very noble pursuit.
A very good friend, pretty lady and brain extraordinaire is coming. RG is one of the most beautiful minds in UP at the moment, lecturing Biology at the Institute of Biology. I remember her as this very bubbly gal whom I met at a certain environmental organisation. She's up for a poster presentation in Brisbane, in the Sunshine State. I wanted her travel to be sulit, so I invited her to come here for a few days. I'd ask her to stay longer, but as I told her before, the Philippines needs its mga paham sa agham (scientists). One mind has already exited that stage, more specifically the field of theoretical physics, so it'd be selfish to ask her to consider working here, wouldn't it? So anyway I'm thinking of places to tour her. Would also be nice to be updated a bit on the wonders of science.
Posted at 01:12 am by starsi
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Thursday, June 30, 2005
Three hundred years after the death of Christ, his followers had multiplied exponentially. The pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, in order to consolidate his power, decided to adopt Christianity as the official religion of the empire. Subsequently, pagan rituals and symbols were transmogrified into the official religion. Egyptian sun disks became the saints' halos. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for the Virgin Mary nursing baby Jesus. Other modern Christian practices like the mass at the altar on Sundays (a tribute to the sun god), communion, the act of "God-eating" derive from pagan rituals. Christ, who lived a magnificent life teaching love for mankind, was elevated as a teacher to a divine personality. Subsequently, only a few gospels remained from about eighty gospels that told the story of Christ, were left to preach the new testament, even excluding the "Q" gospels which is believed to be Christ's gospel.
Constantine held the Council of Nicea to vote upon, among other things, doctrine and the divinity of Christ. Up until that moment, Jesus was treated by his followers as a great and powerful man, but nevertheless mortal. In the Council of Nicea, he was voted as "The Son Of God" - very narrowly. Establishing the divinity of Christ was crucial in the unification of the Roman empire and the new Vatican power base.
"By officially endorsing Jesus as the son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable. This not only precluded further pagan challenges to Christianity, but now the followers of Christ were able to redeem themselves only via the established sacred channel - the Roman Catholic Church."
It was all about power, the Church stole Christ from his own followers, according to author Dan Brown. The Bible is a product of man, not given from heaven. Constantine supposedly commissioned the Bible to omit the human aspects of Christ. One of those human traits was his marriage to Mary Magdalene, to whom he entrusted the building of the church. Subsequently the sexist Church launched a campaign to eradicate the sacred feminine, demonizing pagan rituals as satanic, nature-worshippers as witches, in order to establish the domination of the Church. The bloodline of Christ supposedly still exists till today, a product of his siring with Mary Magdalene.
This is the premise of Dan Brown's best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
Brown contends that the Grail is actually a person - Mary Magdalene - and the search for the Holy Grail has been a search for the sacred feminine, continuously eradicated by the Church.
The Church is purportedly trying to prevent prophecy. Astrologically, the last two thousand years was the Age of Pisces --- the fish, also a symbol of Jesus Christ. As we are entering the Age of Aquarius - the water bearer, the ruling ideals claim that man will learn the truth and be able to think for himself. Such an ideological shift is supposedly of great concern to the established church.
In the story, Harvard professor Robert Langford and French cryptographer Sophie Neveu are searching for the Grail while trying to avoid the police, after Langdon was implicated in the murder of Neveu's grandfather. Finding clues in paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci, they unravel a mystery that goes through the heart of Christianity.
****
The mysterious smile of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is supposedly because of an inside joke. When Da Vinci painted Mona Lisa, he made the left horizon behind Mona Lisa slightly lower, which he wasn't prone to do. This made the left side look larger than the right. Historically, the left side was assigned the female role. Da Vinci was known to be in tune with the balance between male and female, that the human soul can be enlightened by accessing both its male and female aspects.
Da Vinci was also known to be homosexual. The Mona Lisa may also be a portrait of Da Vinci as female. Computer analyses show common points of congruency between Da Vinci's self-portraits and the famous painting.
So the painting may be an androgynous portrait of a human that has both male and female elements. Another clue to this androgynity derives from the painting's name, Mona Lisa. Egyptian God of masculine fertility, Amon, is usually depicted as a man with a ram's head, and his promiscuity and curved horns relate to the modern sexual slang "horny." His female counterpart was Isis, whose ancient pictogram was once called L'isa. Combine the two, you have AMON L'ISA --> MONA LISA
****
I'm proud to say that I figured out some of the clues early on. For example, on page 396, a strange text was debated on whether it was some form of ancient script. I looked at the text and it looked like inverted lettering, and so I checked it out in the mirror, making it legible.
Then another clue they had to find out was the final five-letter word to open the cryptex. When I saw that the clue lay at Sir Isaac Newton's tomb and there was an inscription on the Principia Mathematica and the riddle being "rosy flesh and seeded womb," it seemed natural that the five-letter answer would be "apple". The apple was an apocryphal catalyst for Newton's theory of gravity. It was a symbol of knowledge.
Also it was obvious who the Teacher was after a while.
****
From the book: Scotoma - the condition where preconditioned notions are so powerfully ingrained that the mind blocks out seen incongruity and overrides the eyes. Example:one of the disciples in the painting "The Last Supper"is the female Mary Magdalene. No one sees this until pointed out because we're so used to the idea that the painting is of Jesus and twelve male disciples. A cursory look would show otherwise.#
Posted at 09:03 pm by starsi
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Wednesday, June 29, 2005
There is order in chaos, there is pattern in randomness. Scientists and mathematicians are some of the people who try to coax those patterns in a universe more keen to keep its secrets.
That order is more so seen in some numerical patterns. There's the seemingly boggling Pi (3.141....) that is seemingly endless after the decimal point. There's the unappreciated Base 10 (10, 20, 30,...,10n) that almost everyone uses to create order in a world that doesn't know numbers.
There is PHI* - 1.618 - the Divine Proportion, derived from a Fibonacci sequence, where the sum of adjacent terms equal the next term, and whose quotients equal PHI (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,....).
PHI is considered a beautiful number. An amazing aspect of PHI is its role as a basic building block in nature. Plants, animals and humans have dimensions that have the ratio of PHI to 1. The ratio of female bees to male bees in a honeybee community, for example, is equal to PHI. The spiral shell of a cephalopod mollusc for example has the ratio of PHI in diameter from one spiral to another. Sunflower seeds grow in opposing spirals that have the ratio of PHI from one rotation's diameter to another. PHI is also a ratio for spiralled pinecone petals, leaf arrangement on plant stalks, insect segmentation and so much more. The term Divine Proportion does not have to be taken literally. Nature is more fantastic than the imagination can comprehend. Since it's derived from Fibonacci numbers, maybe it would seem natural that the addition of previous proportions to the next one has survival or natural utility.
Body proportions equal PHI. Measure, for example, the distance from the head's tip to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from the belly button to the floor. Other PHI proportions include the ratio from shoulder to fingertips and from elbow to fingertips. Another one: Divide distance from hip to floor to distance between knee and the floor. Other ones: spinal divisions, finger joints, toes. PHI is a beautiful proportion.
* From the Da Vinci Code
Posted at 02:12 pm by starsi
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Tuesday, June 28, 2005
A presidential admission overdue
GMA finally admits it's her voice in the tapes that implicate her influencing the results of the Philippine elections. Ho-hum, so what else is new. She should step down or be ousted!
Click here to hear Hello Garci ringtone
***
Aussie unions are going to launch strikes on Friday, in protest of government attacks on industrial relations. In the new scheme, employees can negotiate workplace salaries on an individual basis. This undermines unionism, which is seen as an attack on the working class. Whatever the Liberals say, it's an ideologically-motivated policy in favour of Big Business.
Posted at 07:17 pm by starsi
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Monday, June 27, 2005
In 1938, Orson Welles broadcasted the destruction being wrought by malevolent spiked towers on gigantic stilts that appeared in New Jersey, striding down the imperial capital to terrorize the masses who threw themselves in the East River "like rats."
Welles broke off transmission as he was heard suffocating from poisonous fumes sprayed by the extraterrestial invaders. "This is the end now" was his last gasp.
It was intended to be a Halloween prank. The broadcast was adapted from a book written by science fiction writer H.G. Wells. But it exposed the psychological vulnerability of Americans, as a mass panic spread. Humanity was believed to be near extinction.
H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds is now being reinterpreted by Steven Spielberg, with Tom Cruise in a leather jacket and tactically ripped jeans as the hero. Aliens are invading the planet with giant red weeds that suck human blood, a bow to the original Wells version. In movies like this one, humans are reminded of their insect status in the universe, and the fin de siecle arriveth.
H.G. Wells wrote the story of bellicose and unmerciful conquerors invading our blue planet. At a time when European empires were remorselessly enslaving and exterminating the 'other' people in different parts of the globe, Wells considered this outcome as just and inevitable. At the time, the British Empire was committing genocide in places like Tasmania. His novel was a portentous reminder to Europeans that their period in power was insecure. It was a critique particularly of British imperialism.
Spielberg clarifies that the making of this version didn't spring from an anger of any kind, though he recognizes that the US has been embarking on "imperialism" (his word), especially in the last five years. Spielberg says it's just coincidence what's happening now and the timing of this remake of humanity's extinction being re-explored.
Nevertheless, the War of the Worlds is here. But it's not aliens who are the malevolent invaders.
Posted at 01:01 am by starsi
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Sunday, June 26, 2005
Oust GMA campaign mounting
In the Philippines, thousands are taking to the streets, calling for the removal of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) from the presidential office, following accusations that her family benefitted from jueteng(an illegal numbers game). She is also on the hot seat following revelations in taped conversations between her and Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano during the elections, itself illegal, hinting at cheating during the elections. In that sense, she usurped the presidential position and is therefore a non-president sitting in Malacaņang. The problem with this is that it's old news. Accusations of cheating were numerous after the elections and cases were already filed to the Comelec. The taped conversations serve as catalyst to the ongoing movement to remove GMA from office (resignation is not even an appropriate call, since she suffers legitimacy issues).
One can appreciate this as a sign of the increasing democratic sensibilities of the Filipino people. Remember that Filipinos launched the EDSA uprising (named after the main metro highway where people converged) to protest the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Marcos imposed Martial Law, a dark era in Philippine history, where the Marcos regime denied practices of human rights violations - now surpassed by the present regime.
Almost fifteen years later, another president (popularly voted), Joseph Estrada, was ousted after accusations of corruption, bribery, betrayal of public trust, and culpable violation of the Constitution.
This time a tsunano(dwarf tsunami) has stolen democracy from the Filipino people. This regime has also overseen the record killings of community leaders, human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and priests in a spiralling decrepit 'culture of impunity,' if not direct culpability. The country has even been called the most dangerous and murderous country in the world for journalists by international organizations of journalists. The economy has gravely suffered from neoliberal policies and a corrupt system of governance, prejudicial to the local elite and most especially to giant foreign corporations that lavishly sapped the brain capital of the country, its manual strength, as well as rapaciously extracted from its lands and waters. More people consider themselves as living below the poverty level, in a country where a family of six has to live on about P600 a day and an unemployed five million Filipinos. Such burdens were made heavier by more taxes, without the benefit of returned social services. For all these reasons and more, more and more Filipinos have demanded for GMA to answer. GMA suffers the lowest approval rating since Marcos.
Even overseas Filipino groups have joined in solidarity with people in the homeland, by calling for a temporary hold on sending remittances - subject to emergency limitations - to the Philippines, whose economy is being propped up by the billions of dollars in remittances by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).
***
Some people say Filipinos are already suffering from People Power fatigue, as if the last one was just made a month ago. But I think they're more concerned on what's coming after. People are so conscious of the fact that nothing has actually changed in the system after the two EDSAs, so some are actually cynical that only political faces will change, not the whole system. Thus it is crucial for progressives to have intensive dissemination of the idea of a transition council that can represent the broadest sectors of society. Though they shouldn't just stop there. It is not a matter of waiting for the 'ripe conditions' all the time. Objective conditions have always been there, and if substantial change as people may want it does not seem to happen, progressives must show insistence and clarity on the genuine alternative. Progressives must take every opportunity to plod forward, as I'm sure they're doing at the moment. The Filipino masses have been waiting and are now demanding for it. The present moves to oust GMA are in the right direction, but a new country must be given birth to. The lessons of the previous EDSAs must be clarified. One of them is that the political solution of constitutional succession must be reassessed. Another is the review of the kind of leadership that has been offered by the political elite so far. This leads to the conclusion that a new system of governance must be put in place. Action and persistence are needed now more than ever.
Filipinos are tired of hunger, state violence and a sense of hopelessness continually engendered by successive regimes. They are tired of poverty, inequality and social injustice. The Filipino people are not tired to fight for freedom, democracy, economic progress, social upliftment and social justice - in short, for a better future.
Posted at 02:22 am by starsi
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