Congratulations, Roger Federer!!!

I love people who strive for excellence and possess the genius to attain it. Congratulations, Roger, on your unbeaten records, and congrats to the Williams sisters too!!!

I Love You, Michael!!!

the dancer, song-writer, arranger genius

behind

billy jean
beat it (with eddie van halen)
man in the mirror
stranger in moscow
gone too soon
thriller
heal the world
bad
black or white
smooth criminal
dangerous
in the closet
we are the world
the way you make me feel
i just can't stop loving you
jam (video with michael jordan)
rock with you
dirty diana
the girl is mine
wanna be startin' somethin'
human nature
she's out of my life
earth song
you are not alone
scream
blame it on the boogie
don't stop till you get enough
say, say, say (with paul mccartney)
do you remember the time
you rocked my world
will you be there
they don't care about us
(abc)
(i want you back)
(ben)
(music and me)
(i'll be there)

Michael Jackson videos posted on YouTube





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Quick Reading: Philippine-American War (1899-1903)

It puzzles me (though perhaps it shouldn't anymore) that regard for the Philippine-American war had been relatively shy and tight-lipped--as though, by design, thrifty, stingy, or demure. I view it of course in contrast to the emphases taxed on the Spanish, the Japanese, the Marcoses, in cargoes of essays, plays, films, fiction, poetry, music, not least of all paintings, some even sculpture.... Essays orbiting 1899-1903 convince me of just how baleful my sense of history has been. Some of them did anger me; but even more alerted me to my lame, lazy register of the story of our nation. Links below direct you to the sites that have posted some such writings in very brief excerpts, if not in the original. Most of you, I'm certain, speak of a measure of awareness (some to astuteness) as concerns the revolution and the Fil-Am war. It shames me so that I have only now begun an attentive tour of those chapters in our nation's saga.

Of course, though I inserted the essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," I do not count it an especially affirming note to the cause then of the Philippine revolution. Little about the author's being the famous Mark Twain (or Samuel Langhorne Clemens minus the pen) made the freedom cause, for me, all the more silly or by notches the more right. Twain, being the humorist writer he was known to be (i.e. of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Celebrated Jumping Frog, my favorite The Gilded Age, and Innocents Abroad), had been largely taken to in his time as satirist and comic. Now, I look on his words approvingly on account not of their being the fiery protests of a well-known Westerner, but of their being fair and frank in their admissions. I prefer his words read by many for whatever is much that they hint of the drifts of thinking, rare or usual in the America of those years. This was eras before Guantanamo, decades ahead of the camps in the Holocaust or the merciless bombings of towns in Japan, way prior to the Vietnam War, the Korean massacres, and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. And to my mind, it merits some deal, if not of telling, at least of our remembering as those bequeathed the gains of past hope, courage, and sacrifice.

I'm not Anti-American, at all, and I don't find that unseemly to say for the reasons in which I ardently believe. The American establishment, besides, is not alone with a history of foreign occupations, abuse and killings. What I'm against is any policy, domestic or foreign, that helps make a reality of some of the horrors narrated in the writings I would like shared with you--most of them meticulous to the final appalling detail. What renders them so depressing for me is the fact of our encounter, as a people, with such a terror of a policy in action, something launched in the interest of a "civilizing mission," which though harrowing and violent in itself could not even live up to its surface justifications. The American (as can and must other) society can be a close friend to any separate community. But if it ages to desert unsolved the puzzle that has been its very history (pieces of which built from well beyond its territory), we, beyond being co-actors in just such tale, must know the parts of it that make a fraction of our narrative... We study events to check them less for the debate that knowledge of them occasions than for the lessons they impart which we may apply to our time... Frank McCourt wrote in the novel Angela's Ashes that "no one can make up an empty mind; you must stock it"; and I agree with him. The first Fil-Am war is only one event among several, several like it which we must recall for the wisdom and the empowerment there is to earn from it. Knowledge is right here for us to wield, though not always without cost, usually with benefits to outvalue the price paid for it. The point is not to reap anyone or thing the affection or loathing that's useless or unfair to give now. In remaining in contact with the roots of a past rich in pain, we need not forgo our chances at relief, recovery, joy, cooperation, friendship, respect, and peace. We must arm each other with the knowledge of what we cannot again let happen, things we were once at pains to survive as a still young nation, those that we must, by now, be advised not to allow to repeat in the Philippines or elsewhere.

Another link, by the way, leads to "Battle Royal," chapter one of Ralph Ellison's wonderfully crafted "The Invisible Man." It's worth your time. -tears, tears, tears- Hee hee. (For still more classic fiction reading, you can check out http://members.lycos.co.uk/shortstories/) Peruse galore!

"Proclamation of War" by Pedro Paterno

"The Balangiga Massacre: Getting Even" by Victor Nebrida

"Kipling, 'the White Man's Burden,' & US Imperialism" in Monthly Review

"To the Person Sitting in Darkness" by Mark Twain


"Mark Twain - Anti-Imperialist" in Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War by Jim Zwick

"Ferocity of the Filipinos" in The New York Times (07 August 1899)

"Kramer Revisits the Fil-am War" in The Johns Hopkins University Gazette

"The Water Cure: Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago" by Paul Kramer

"Macario Sakay: Tulisan or Patriot?" by Paul Flores

"Miguel Malvar, the Last Holdout" by Paul Dimayuga

"Keeping the Spirit of 1896 Alive" by Onofre D. Corpuz

"Gen. Jose Ignacio Paua: A Chinese General in the Philippine Revolution" by Teresita Ang-See


EXTRA:


"Martyrdom of a Leader" by Alexader Remollino

"Ugly Balikbayans and Heroic OCWs" by Vicente L. Rafael

"Clair de Lune" by Claude Debussy

Landgrabs for Food?

Please check out a very important article on landgrabbing for food by fellow blogger caffeine sparks.

LOOK BEFORE LUNGING: Read, Study, Think FOR YOURSELF!

If you must disagree with them, if you must take a stance that differs with them, or from their own, I hope you do so after digesting their Ideas. If you must love or hate Marx, Marxism, Socialism, for instance (as is voguish to do), I suggest that you go over his Books and Ideas first. Quit adopting positions and making enormous determinations just on the say-so of garrulous folks. If you must criticize Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche or Blaise Pascal, for instance, try reading their words first, then look into the works of minds that support them and add to their arguments and check for how they explain things, how they evaluate them, how they come to some findings on them, and why they say what they say in sum about them, for you to be acquainted with them intelligently and learn how appropriately to measure them. Don't journey an ocean of knowledge using others' opinions as reference points; learn to voyage the waters yourself. Read the works of the people said to have made certain statements for you to know what exactly those statements are, how they were meant, how they were illumined, and what frameworks of studying they wish set out, for at most, they've attempted either a fuller knowing or clarification. Philosophies aren't things you can choose from so capriciously; they are as much inductively as deductively crafted. They are built of theories that hope to extract the principles behind things, behind how things work, how they form, how they alter. They are as much explanations as they are verdicts on what things are and what things could be. The beginning therefore of understanding lies only and deeply in their reading. Read first, read, read. Don't read them through Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia, or any survey book. Read their material as they themselves wrote them. Read the books. If you could manage it, read them in their original languages, but if you can't at least read them as translations directly from the original. Read your philosophy between the lines of the books that actually create philosophy. If you want to know about Democracy, read about it, since its inception in Greece. If you wish to learn about Socialism, then read about its history. So you have a sense of what concepts can be; why Democracy is not absolutely tied to Vicious Capitalism, and why the notion that it is is in point of fact a vulgar objection to the meaning. Read and read. So you can gauge certain labels and practices against the philosophies. Read. Do not allow your media, your government, your teacher, your school, your parents, your friends, your class president, to shovel down your throats what Books are about, what Ideas are about, what the Thinkers are about. Read them yourself. Read them slowly, closely, and bravely. Not with an aim of adopting a convenient philosophy, or of picking from a multitude a system of knowing that you find easiest to comprehend. Read as much as you can. That I've come to love best Nietzsche (not Foucault), and Marx, and Herbert Marcuse, and Raymund Williams, and Blaise Pascal, is because I've read their Ideas for myself. And by "love," I don't mean approving of their notions wholesale. My formulations have as much disagreement as agreement with their own. They try to explain "how things are"; the right way to read them is to evaluate whether their conclusions have bases, or do not have adequate basis. They try also to further ambitions of evaluative conviction, like they seek to advance their own alternative design of what things could be. And so whenever one peruses Philosophy, one has to learn to read it for everything that it tries to explain, such as what it illustrates as its basic hope in terms of practical or life aspiration, and what it puts forth as theories, that are syllogistic claims of Law and Principle, whose goal is to thresh out precisely the way things operate, and by "things," I mean the subject of polemic, or the crux of discourse, say Knowledge, in the case of an Epistemology or the Philosophy of Knowledge or the Knowing of Truth and Reality, or Philology, or the Philosophy of Language, etc. You choose only on the basis of correctness, not on laziness, not on impatience, and if to the questions you want answered you encounter no clear answer, then perhaps you can help carry on the effort, the effort of explaining how things work, what things are, what things might be, how things might work, supplementing all that with your position on what is best to be achieved, what is best to work. That's what Philosophy and Theory are. If you do not bother to read them completely, then you will never understand or react to them appropriately. Don't just react because you feel like reacting; learn to react aided by a fuller knowing of what things are about, from the complexities, to the depth and breadth, and in the case of Ideas and Books, the raging need to get them written.

If more than half the writing there is that has been reacting to Ideas and Books and Thinkers and Evaluations is coached by gossip or impressionistic revulsion, then we do no one justice, not even our own minds.

These days, I notice an even greater need to engage many in the proper reading of concepts, realities, books and terminology. Read, read, read, and cogitate thrice more. If you want to know about Socialism or Communism or Democracy or Fascism for example, read about them. If you want, properly, to judge them, then know them, not only for examples set by those who profess them as beliefs or ways of life, but for how the concepts began and changed or can change for either the worse or the better. What do we mean by Democracy? Read about it, and think, think, think. What do we know about Nietzsche, besides the disdain there has been for having been the Idol of the ignoramus Hitler? What do we know about things? and Ideas and Truth and Reality? Read, discuss if you must or can, ask around, but best of all, learn to think, think, think. The best way to enhance thinking abilities is by reading voraciously and sparing moments in a day to really digest words.

Students old and young, Read for yourself. Cease obsessions with second-hand testimony. Learn for yourself. Put an end to this habit of going by other people's opinions. Form yours fairly on the basis only of your knowledge. Learn by heart what you're agreeing and objecting to. Don't become the unreasoning fools who spread the very foolishness that handicaps and ails them. Study, study, and study. Reason with Ideas, reason with yourself, reason with problems, reason with people, reason with issues. Use critical reason persistently so you can see its vastness and discover its limits. Think, think, think. Read, read, read. Observe, Observe, observe. Then think, think, think again. If we make decisions resting on what we believe things to be, then we must try to know things and sufficiently. Not as academic education urges, but as life itself obliges. Begin demanding and seizing your own education.

"Worry Me to Sobs: Care for a Bit of Education?"

"Worry Me to Sobs: Care for a bit of Education?"
When 'keeping things plain' means limiting things and readers unreasonably
by beatrixpg



It's no use tarrying in zones of view at once comforting and threatening. Students of the past--the eager ones, at least--throve in times of intellectual "ordeal." Now, I sense a change so drastic as to worry and weary me in scholarship. A student (male, in his 30s) made a strange point the other day. However impertinent, it's a point nonetheless that a teacher of epistemology or any subfield of rational analysis must think through fast and carefully. His idea shrieks of utter philistinism, but inasmuch as it voices those of so many students, I now bother to answer in a more engaging manner. The aim of teaching after all is in part to coax students into the fold of avid learners, a frame of valid inquiry, or a direct involvement in notable, usable discovery. The teacher later to triumph in his work has first to learn what's right to share with students--"right" since proper not just to some or one in particular, but to the reality at large as lived--it's what I've picked up from my great friend Caroline Hau, under whose mentorship I cheer.

Now, the reality that something like his point could even be raised was enough to make me want to attack it, fangs out and knees bent for the lunge; I didn't however. I fashioned arguments, hopefully, to bear on the way he next views complexities in "reading and writing." He began his talk with the assertion that writers of any sort, on whatever scale of intellect, must seek humbly an audience with the readers of their choice, dependent that they are on people taking the time to even consider their writings, and by "considering them," he meant sparing them a look. For such reason, he added, they must, the writers, do as able, in order to speak in words easily and readily absorbed.

He stressed that a writer's work, even at the time of publication, matters at most to himself, hence all (not certain of) our writers must ensure that their words in each particular can be understood and right away interest the audience they sought out. The reader, in his sense of it, is like a consumer the writer must try his hardest to please and appease with gentle, easy conversation, except that in his description of a "light conversation," he seemed to mean facile, laid back, narrow-ranging chatter. The writer, he said, only pleads for attention to words that concern, if not wholly, then chiefly, himself. So, he must with his opening simple phrases be able to convince of his worthiness of attention.

We've chronicled all manner of trends in our studies, and nothing more shocks me than the changes that incline us to anti-intellectualism. From beneath the argument of the student leers the now popular philisitinism perilous for rigorous thought. Many argue that books have no worth; to this day, many say that. They say learning by experience is pure and real. The assumption there is that writers have no experience, and that to read about life is to sully one's outlook. But is the view of experience, with which we begin to perceive and make sense of it, a pure one? How so? What doctrines are imposed only in readings and totally absent from practical reality? Even the understanding of "experience" has been attempted to help life, to make the actions of people and their responses better and easier, in tomes of writing whose noble goal has endlessly been to educate. The most vociferous in their statements about "experience" and "knowledge," those quick to writhe at all things "intellectual" (whereas we used to cringe and wince at all things imbecilic), are those who know the least about them as concepts and dare to tutor us in their wonderful stupidity. No wonder the arguments fracture, fissure beneath the weight of a fuller review. They humor me, truly; but laughing at them is no pleasure for me, as it hurts me badly at the sides. Understanding the written idea is practice-processing the principle behind things. When reading, one's made to utilize the intellect a great deal more than when not reading. And dismal exposure to books creates comprehension problems that in turn betoken much larger difficulties for the future.

A writer (i.e. a philosopher, fictionist, poet, analyst, scientist) puts himself always to the task of educating, while speaking to, people--and this is the case, no matter the absence of motive to cajole or urge or tug over to one's side the reader. Words when digested tend, on some level, to teach and counsel by imparting, period. They're able to gesture for deeds from within the inmost pockets in the especially attentive human mind. His ideas' room in a discursive meeting place (regardless of whether they indeed merit writing and reading in terms of quality) may coach as much the knowing of things as the receiver's will to make new or continuing realities of what's learned about through ideas, or words per se. So, he must stay as wise an "educator" as achievable, I would insist, though he need not try pleasing us at all costs.

Some of us bestow reading and writing more value than typically liked. It's not the writer's job to pacify even the readership in mind--readers as the absorbing end of scribbled speech, as the presumable learners or students of and through words. The reader may opt not to take on writings deemed too difficult, may shove them well enough aside and hide or junk them, and may ignore the ambition they mean to further. What education, through their reading, he misses out on, is then wasted on account merely of either intellectual mistrust or laziness. What decisions he makes in life that fail, because of impatience with learning, reading, and knowledge, thus count among his personal liabilities. (I set aside here the question of comprehension ability, something we also gauge learning potential against).

The student's argument about writing is that of a person incapable of viable insight and industrious study, and demanding the pampering the world can manage for him. He fails to see the importance of learning by reason also of bare education, of thrifty attentiveness to study and books, and of sparse capacity for absorption. He says in effect, "give it to me eas(il)y or I won't take it at all," as if the favor of education is mostly done the educator. But not all writers write begging for notice to elevate something or single themselves out for public regard; not all write seeking notice, period. True, without it actually registered, the point in a message is virtually as good as nonexistent. It may be lost on some or many, but it's not necessarily proven, on such basis, absent or worthless.

The best that we can do to help mutual gain and improvement, and in this case through reading, is to make available and ready the tools needed for the task. Once available, the decision to pursue education as required or desired is one the "student" has to make for himself. The point is that once the tools are made accessible and deprivation of knowledge is completely prevented, the offer of learning becomes that which the student can choose as much to accept or negotiate, as to challenge, resist or turn down. Just as he may embrace the potential for education by reading, so may he denounce its very concept. But I wonder, on what defense?

The duty of the wiser, in this regard, is only to assist in making possible our education in many and changing improving ways; once enabled, learning becomes then an option we as students, or in this case, as learner-readers, may or may not sieze for our benefit. But I won't ever agree that learning through reading and writing intelligently are loopholes to avoid, for certainly they're not. If we always serve up to people the easiest ways out--easiest way to write or read (idiot guides that guide--consign--us to idiocy)--we give them over to mediocrity of mind. In the academe, philistinism has become some benchmark for performance to level up to; people posthaste have ceased pursuing the truly "intellectual" answers to questions even at university level, and we now hear students demanding readings that are suited in quality of thought and expression to their range of mental patience for words.

I've been thrown prissy questions related to the subject of "writing and reading" many times now. The truth is that I never really mind having to field them. But I do ponder occasionally the load of effort made to tire each other with talk whose pleasure is in stoking hatred of thinking and jeering at writings "too smart to comprehend."

There's not a thing that guarantees education like the yearning, the inner furor, for it; aptitude, perseverance and desire for it are the most taxing to combat, most worthless to scourge, and best of all, the most difficult to beat.

Now, I, in a sense, chivvy people into reading more and doing it for the sense to catch in ideas. For no tragedy's more wounding than what smug ignorance bodes for itself. If the conditions of our lives treat us so generously to the possibility of learning (with a wealth of both reading and writing material, for instance), then why not help ourselves to it? We must furnish people with the breaks and aid they deserve, but we must also nurture independent study. If you have all the breaks to achieve something, then learn to work toward and achieve it on your own, and that's what some of us are taught, and that's what teaches others the appropriate basics. You ply them at best with tips on reading and studying; if they must read books to learn from them, and wish to learn critically in general, then they must also learn to read them self-assisted. When you're ladled food, you spade in and chew and swallow it yourself. Either you get your muscles working, or they're denied their function completely. To that comes down our being able to stay relevantly alive. If you've had all the breaks, make the most of them and learn. We only study so we can mature able to sieve out for ourselves, and not be fed by others, the grains of ideas to nourish us. If you have the knowledge, you don't live merely quavering out responses to life's sordid pressures. You don't quiver before the challenge to your wisdom and ability. In places where the idiot guide is made to last, lazy idiocy is encouraged for most, while wiser thought is pushed only for a few. There's a hand there that thieves about ever so slyly, and fiddles unwatched with your options in life; you must swat it off before it steals your intelligence.