The Ambition or Inhibition?

Well my ambition has gotten me this far, far from my friends that I miss so, drinking and smoking out, having fun and exchanging stories here and there. Life is full of mysteries, and I still have to uncover them all, time heals all wounds, yet we begin to contemplate the what if's and the what nots. Only a man would know his comfort zone, and only a man would know if he cannot handle eating and studying in a crowd. We have to be merciful in all aspects I guess... Yeah i'm a guessing man, maybe that's why I rarely gamble, only with my friends over poker, hehe! Well, I guess I LOVE the simple lifestyle, I hate complaining... so I would rather read the newspaper. Getting married would give you more responsibility... are you ready to take this on? are you sure you can? Damn, once you have uncovered how to make a Starwars Death star... you might just get to make one... but is your quality of life so Megamind to comprehend? Well I guess all i want to say is that the further we dream, the better the world should get... but NO... that is not how the hierarchy and oligarchies gave it planned for the sustainability of the country. We should be afraid of the risks, yet be men to take them on... like the rest of things we have in our bucket lists. Development should be slow, and built on the dreams of engineers and astuteness and research of lawyers in the fields. I guess I should try looking for work for the MAN... yet the MAN who understands that he also has to help out the lower rungs of society, in a wellness haven of opportunities and capacities in which they can alleviate their current situation; hence only being a better part of the quality of society. I want to be a painter, a poet and a dreamer. I would like to take over my mom's business, it's small and we do furniture, sell antiques and melancholy new wave chic items while providing the flavor of history's past. I feel like an alien at times, too discreet to fit in, yet too obvious to the glories and love... I still love being myself, even if I have to find this body, and respect it like Jesus would. Am i the son of my father, should I reflect on my past indiscretions, of opportunities lost and capabilities which I could have been making lots and lots of money on... yeah fool yourself, you are only as good as your word... yet I am Ali Baba, the man with words and a mind that runs on people's fears and joy. I am indeed ignorant, yet I will try with my best living my simple lifestyle. Is that how man should feel, to feel his real actualization and act according to his vices... that which I shall remove step by step... Am i a leech, a vampire, a werewolf, a frankenstein and a mummy? All "bee"ing pollinated and imprinted on my devious mind.. not allowing me to be me in the presence of my greatest and most lovable company. Am I am still not sure I am allowed in their circle, yet I guess I will love them even more, because that is the love which I receive in my home. You will see the truth, and the greatest answers in the eyes of the youth, every touch and every breath you make and every movement you do will affect others around you in astounding ways, it's like they can read minds... yeah it's real crazy... Bob Ong being a person who empowers me to write this weirdness on a blog. Yeah... free material, a window to my imagination, yet you would need to walk in my shoes like Johnny Walker to imagine how difficult and exciting life is. Everything presented to me is not of my own doing, yet from my own effort and ghist, even if such effort is only B-... I am still me and I long to have a simple life and provide joy to who every I may meet.. yet be humble and shy not to reveal all my dark secrets and buried heart. Home is where the birds sing, it's where you get random calls on birthdays which are simple yet special events to reconnect in time. I feel like a long way home, yet I will never know the opportunities of back there again, I am shy of greatness, yet my mind is too expensive to grasp. I forget to give way, and I do not think critically in front of my closest friends. I am indeed a "TUS" and all my sins are revealed in an instant due to my open nature and enclosed heart... yet sometimes the jackal comes out pag may atraso... o may tangkaso o tang ina.. pero kaso - aso ka! lol! the weirdness spreads yet again.

I recently bought a book, its a great hardbound architecture book with minimal living spaces that show how wonderful simple life can be. It has many solutions that can be adopted in our country, for small upscal houses or from incremental housing which Intramuros is beginning... yet is it safe to build such buildings in areas is another question. We are slaves to our sins and we are abrupt to give in to them, yet we are driven to move them forward, the reward is sometimes more responsibility which your heart cannot take, or would cost you for much more service.

Getting ready for school

Hmm, cool day yesterday, watched Deadland... the movie sucked! and Wild Target... sobra hot ni emily blunt. Friday today so I guess i'll have to finish my report about "Overview on the problems of surface and groundwater contamination by agriculture impacts in Vietnam. Already finished it and would pass it to my group mates for updating. Now I have to answer the exercise that our professor Dr. Hans Voigt has us doing.

Damn, I need to think more critically. It's kinda hard to make friends, especially if you are not used to approaching other people. Were like talking guns.. damn! Sometimes you can't help but give it to the man or just be nice and have a cool chat. I find it corny starting a talk about family to a stranger, oh well!

Oh yeah, will be going to Binh's wedding, cool vietnamese guy, his wedding is on the new year, can't wait!

New day New day New day!

Was thinking of making his own website, and maybe make some money... one day...
but for now I guess I will keep this site for me just to vent my mind off and stuff... for now...
So yeah, I began a TIME DIARY! Yes, I actually am trying to follow this routine of my day... Kinda sad being Baba Black Sheep and ali Baba at the same time. But cmon' I gotta start somewhere! So here we are mosley'ing along the day, I gotta study for my ground water management excercises today after public lecture, also I gotta clean my breakfast cup, i'm having coco pops and cina "fresh" milk. I also got some movies, but I should focus on my studies like a mofo if you know what I mean. Just watched Shrek Forever after... waa was soo scared of Rumpelstiltskin...sana hindi ako maging ganun... oh well, still miss my friends, still trying to know who I am since I don't know anything. All I know is i'm an architect who want to get into business / project management. Should look for a tutor for that. But my main concern today is my school exercises and my unknown thesis proposal... wa!

EQUALITY, let the MUSIC of our forefathers be FREE and give them their DUE FEES!

Hey tito, the thing that does not make sense is the income-differentials and the architects of the buck. We have to build people's dreams for them once we reach an age of awareness and global understanding of how this world works, we have e...xcellent standards in the field of education in the U.P. The children of the corn will come back to haunt us. We have to show mercy to the man, and offer charity as professionals, but how to live after that is called the mystery of LIFE. Stop the mafia-ish prirates and gray butterfly effects, they are all just part of daily mental defects. Till the twin towers again they erect, I shall burn bridges with my ill effects! Eminem gotta come to my stage again, if he knew how to cuss, it's all just because, the 2pac got his way right, making that buck every night, come here and sing for free, yeah! we all global wannabees! We promote GLOBAL CITIZENRY up in here! Where the world must be equal, I don't know, I don't have any money to show!

Ode to BTNH and the best star ever... our Joker, Heath Ledger... RIP brother...

Going Bizzy, getting Krazy, dying Lazy, and Wishing for that Flesh like the BTNH has it's perks; The end of the dayZ of our Lives wil begin through plastic, we need heroes like them in a world wide broadcast of the truth and awareness! And that my friends will set you free from the shackles of humanity and be at peace with the real O~"G"od! We are not the masters of our actions, yet we are privy to decide unless strapped like Jose Rizal to his post. We must look the other way and face our bullets, only then shall we see the truth of the glory which God presents us.

Media Policies on Language and Awareness

We need more Filipino movies with english subtitles. our local movies are rich in flavor, context and of course comedy.  We never fail to laugh off our mishaps and faults, yet we should promote our culture and our heritage to the fullest which in turn can spur tourism in our far flung regions and rural communities. We should make peace to Mindanao, let us begin the awareness program of language, dialects and business english.Through proper awareness of language and dialects, we can make smarter choices on the children we adopt from our rural provinces, we must help and keep contact with our lost mothers like APOL'd'AP who has ethnic background, yet grounded in developing our country through universal music and dance; this in turn is will be the necessary development for equality of speech, bringing a new awareness to accessible resources who plow our fields and suffer the hardships of rural life, the Philippine youth needs to be educated in our rural cities with the best education available, with the best resources available that is FREE; this is my understanding of what Clinton proclaimed and our president respects. We can begin by formally putting english subtitles to all our movies, be it ethnic or tagalog. We must learn our languages since they are the essence of our being global citizens. We must promote our rich culture; this in turn might finally give us all peace and pave a way to the development the Philippines deserves. The more these impoverished people die from on-comming multiplied disasters, we must rescue them, through our common language, yet also be sensitive to how we advertise our movies and shows. We must be professional on how we show media in our mega manila region, only then may be encapsulate the city and stop it's irreversible growth. 

Here is the current list of Ethnic Diversity and Dialects in our country:

There is a need to conserve our dying history, as most claim we do not even have culture. As an architect I cry at the fact that we do not have our own original housing typology, except for that which was made by our hero, Jose Rizal. We must be aware of the slavery in the Philippines, we must respect our brothers and sisters, we should be united and not fragmented in our thinking, we must believe in a brighter future for the Philippines, one with unity based on the blood of our sleepy hollows soaked in history's bliss in slavery. The next information is based on a great man from the USA, Cesar Lumba and Roal Cantada who has taught me more than I can handle on my own. Here are his words of wisdom I would like for my readers to delve into and analyze to be enlightened. Bringing back the three pm habit and the sign languages in the news, from co-hosts are a great way to respond to the 20th century.

Many decades after my journey through Philippine elementary and high school education, I now realize how inadequate my education has been about Philippine history. We who grew up in the Philippines learned world history and American history rather early in our lives, but we learned very little about our own history. The historian I grew up with was Gregorio Zaide, who in retrospect was a historian who wrote Philippine history with a decidedly western world view. Either that, or my history teachers were mere parrots owned by the West.

We were taught - in the 50s - that the Spaniards had burned books about the Philippines because those books allegedly were pagan books and were works of the devil. This was why there was very little historical information about the Philippines prior to the arrival of the Spanish cross and Eskrima.

Turns out there was a wealth of information about Philippine life, social and political structures. The scholar-historians had to do some digging, but this they did and all the juicy information about the Philippines in pre-Spanish colonial era burst into the surface. I was already in college - a full-time working student - when new research about pre-Spanish Philippines found their way into Philippine history textbooks.

The result is that there are gaping holes in my knowledge of Philippine history. I suspect that there are many in my generation who have this problem.

I was therefore very happy, in fact deliriously happy to discover the blog http://mananalaysay.blogspot.com where the excerpt below can be found.

CHANGES IN SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN 17TH CENTURY IN THE PHILIPPINES

by
Roel Cantada

"Take a look at the figure above and compare the 16th century social structure of the Philippines with that of the 17th century. What changed? What happened to the Datu? Timawa? Alipin? Who occupied the highest and lowest social statuses?

"These questions are what we will try to answer in this lesson. Notice that the highest social status is now occupied by the Spaniards and all the natives are below them. This means that wealth is not the only basis of the social classes but race as well. The implication is that no matter how wealthy a native gets he will never be equal or higher than a Spaniard in the colonial society. The racial barrier is something that will never be overcome unless the Spaniards are removed from the country.

"What if a native marry a Spaniard will their children be considered Spaniards? The answer is no, the Spaniards consider only pure blooded Spaniards, and half-breeds whom will be called mestizos later on (creoles in Latin America) will not be accepted equal to Spaniards. But in the 17th century there is not enough half-breeds to constitute a separate class.

"During this time the Spaniards coined three terms to refer to the natives of the Philippines. They called the natives who had converted to Catholicism indios, the muslim moros, and the pagans of the Cordilleras in Luzon, igorots. All three terms had bad connotations and should be avoided today. Both the datu’s family and the timawa are now called indios which when translated in the native languages would be equivalent to Tagalog, Visaya, Bikolano etc. The word indio is a word used by the Spaniards to refer to the natives of Latin America, wherein Columbus I think made a mistake when he thought that he was in India when in fact he was in another continent. In English it is the same as calling the natives of North America Indians. It is also related to the terms Indonesia, East Indies (Philippines and Indonesia) , and West Indies (Cuba, Haiti etc.).

"Returning to our figure, you would have noticed that the lowest class is now occupied by the timawas. What happened to the alipins? They were freed or natimawa by the Spaniards. The King of Spain issued a proclamation banning slavery (esclavitud in Spanish), and the Pope also issued a bull stating the same and even threatening excommunication for anyone keeping a native slave. But these proclamations where not automatically enforced because there was one curious thing about the implementation of Spanish laws in the Philippines: the governor general can decide which laws to implement and when given the current conditions and because of the distance from Spain. It takes months before communication with Spain arrives and consultation would have been impossible for emergencies. It probably took a hundred years before slavery disappeared. Until the 17th century some Pampangan datus were reported to have filed cases in Manila against their slaves who had escaped. The Spaniards being weak and under threat from Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and muslims tribes from the south did not want to alienate their datu allies. Rather it was the next generation who had converted to Catholicism and integrated the values of Christianity taught by the church that had resulted in the freeing of slaves.

"Of course for the Timawa the implication was not good, they had become the lowest class and lost prestige. In fact by the 17th century the word timawa is no longer associated with being free or freedom, something positive, but with being destitute, poor, and always hungry. Today no one wants to be called timawa, because it has been equated with being a slave rather than being free. But as late as 1896 during the Philippine revolution Andres Bonifacio used it in his poem to mean free. Later on they would coin the new word malaya (free) to avoid the negative connotations of the word timawa.

"The datus did not go unscathed by the freeing of the slaves. The power of the datus in the 16th century was based on slavery. The slaves did the extra farm work that provided more crops and they served as rowers in the balangay boat for warfare. Without the slaves the datus lost prestige, wealth and military power. Later on we will talk about how the Spaniards substituted other institutions for datus to remain higher than the timawas."

Who were the datus and what were their perks and privileges? In much of the Philippines, the datus were the political leaders and the owners of vast farms, called the bukid or kabukiran. They owned many slaves, which were differentiated according to whether they lived in their own houses (namamahay) or lived in makeshift shelters on the grounds of the datus' houses (sagigilids).

Because the Catholic Church forbade slavery in the 17th century, the slaves were technically freed from bondage and ascended to the status of timawas, free men who were mostly poor but who counted among them some rich families who excelled in commerce. The datus technically no longer had slaves (alipins) but in practice still had them because the people who owed them money had to repay them through involuntary servitude.

The Spaniards were not willing to cross the datus because they needed those datus as allies against foreign invaders such as the notorious Chinese bandit, Limahong. This was the reason slavery persisted even after the Catholic Church mandated the abolition of slavery in the Philippines and other Spanish colonies.

The alipins, as an institution in the Philippines' social structure, have been formally absent since the 17th century, but in reality many Filipinos functioned as alipins until the the Land Reform Act in the 1960s was passed. Prior to Land Reform, many tenants of the biggest landlords were virtual slaves, working off debts to the landlords - for medicines, for rice seeds (palay), for operating capital for their small farms.

Until political correctness became fashionable, the treatment of housemaids and houseboys in the Philippines hearkened back to that earlier period in the country's history, when whole generations of pre-Spanish "Filipinos" were functioning as slaves.

The Spaniards as a ruling class have of course disappeared. They have been absorbed into the great mass of educated elites. Economically, the rich Chinese have replaced the Spaniards. Unlike the Spaniards, the Chinese tend to be as pliant and adaptable as the bamboo and have blended seamlessly into Philippine society. The Chinese are rich and powerful, but they are decidedly Filipino. They have never once hinted that they are superior to the local population the way the Spaniards saw themselves as being.

Going back to Philippine slaves. Slavery in the Philippines still exists today in the Filipino people's psyche. Many of the dirt poor people in the provinces behave as though their rich, landed patrons owned them.

The quality of Philippine democracy rests on the backs of people who have never known true independence and freedom. The masses who vote in Philippine elections - most Filpinos who are of voting age vote - are not voting their consciences but are voting choices dictated by their patrons and virtual masters.

This is how the powerful in the country retain power. The rich and influential people align themselves with their chosen candidates and generally deliver the votes in their spheres of influence.

The leftists in the 60s referred to Philippine democracy as de-mock-cracy. It was and still is a mockery, since most people in the provinces who cast their votes are not casting votes for their choices. They are mere clones of their patrons at the voting booths.

People talk about the utang na loob institution. Add to that the slave complex as a social institution.

The few who rule over the local economies and the local corridors of power are allowed to choose their candidates, while the great mass of the people echo those choices. This is why there are so many political dynasties in the Philippines. It is an important reason why the same people keep running and winning political offices in the Philippines, regardless of their abysmal records of service. Known jueteng and drug lords continue to be re-elected. It's always the same families, the same political groups, the same corrupt politicians that keep winning political offices there.

The rich and powerful decide who should retain or ascend to political power, while the great mass of political slaves make sure that the will of the rich and powerful is enforced in the ballot box.

The obvious question from all this discussion is this: if the great mass of voters in the Philippines act as ideological slaves of their padrinos (patrons) and not as independent agents who vote their consciences and according to their own ideologies and convictions, is true democracy possible in the Philippines?

Would the Philippines not be better off under the rule of a benevolent dictator? True, we tried this with Marcos and were greatly disappointed. Marcos was, in the language of today's youth, a bad, mean dude, but not every man or woman in the Philippines is a potential Marcos. Absolute power need not corrupt absolutely.

If Noynoy does what he promised to do in the campaign and the Philippines becomes a much better place and country, Filipinos should start thinking of keeping Noynoy as president for the long-term. He cannot be a Lee Kwan Yew if his term is limited to six years. The constitution would have to be amended to allow Noynoy to succeed himself for another term and after that for still another term, so don't hold your breath.

So far, Noynoy despite his glaring mistakes in judgment and execution is following through on his promises. The country is becoming stronger economically and slowly gaining admirers as a modern state. The world, especially the U.S., is eating out of Noynoy's hands. If he keeps this up, the country may find itself in its first golden age.

It is beginning to look like the masters and the slaves found someone who would lead the Philippines for the benefit of all, not just the masters. We will watch the developments in the Philippines in the coming months and years while keeping our fingers crossed.

http://nykos2.blogspot.com/2010/10/slavery-in-philippines.html

Here are current figures from 2000, based on the Central Intelligence Agency website.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/notesanddefs.html

¢Ethnic Diversity:

¢Multiple ethnicities, and cultures are found throughout the islands.

¢Ecologically, the Philippines is one of the most diverse countries in the world.

¢Languages:

¢Filipino (official; based on Tagalog) and English (official);

¢ 8 major dialects –

¢Tagalog (28.1%),

¢Cebuano (13.1%)

¢Ilocano (9%)

¢Hiligaynon or Ilonggo (7.5%)

¢Bicol (6%

¢Waray (3.4%)

¢Bisaya/Binisaya 7.6%

¢Others such as Pampango, and Pangasinan (25.3%)

¢(2000 census, CIA)

NEO meets Germany and Vietnam

Doing the MAtrix action again... looking for signs, not omens, He will take my life if he wills it. Will watch Harry Potter, and then go to a furniture store, C something, yet make before we leave... pupu, hehe! :D Holly Jolly times!
Shutterflies should come before me!

COP16 | CMP6 - Special Climate Change Program - Mexico's Actions

COP16 | CMP6 - Special Climate Change Program - Mexico's Actions

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change