AMONG THE ‘BLESSED’ AND THE ‘HOLY’

What is wrong (or right) about this picture?

image from gmanews.tv

ANTHONY BOURDAIN GOES FOOD TRIPPING IN THE PHILIPPINES

Anthony Bourdain of No Reservations fame goes sampling the food cuisine of the islands, from papaitan, sisig, to lechon.  He is led by a Fil-Am New Yorker trying to reconnect with his Filipino roots.

Via gmanews.tv

part 2

part 3

part 4

part 5

ANOTHER ARGUMENT FOR LEGALIZING DRUGS: PORTUGAL

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It’s not the Netherlands.)

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled “coffee shops,” Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don’t enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal’s drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

Link.

THIS MADE ME LAUGH

A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.

Engineer: What’s with these guys? We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!

Doctor: I don’t know but I’ve never seen such ineptitude!

Priest: Hey, here comes the greenskeeper. Let’s have a word with him.

Priest: Hi George. Say George, what’s with that group ahead of us? They’re rather slow aren’t they?

George: Oh yes. That’s a group of blind fire fighters. They lost their sight while saving our club house last year. So we let them play here anytime free of charge!

(silence)

Priest: That’s so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.

Doctor: Good idea. And I’m going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there’s anything he can do for them.

Engineer: Why can’t these guys play at night?!

The Way Engineers Think

CARL SAGAN AND HIS DRAGON

The Dragon in My Garage

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage”

Suppose (I’m following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you.  Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself.  There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

“Show me,” you say.  I lead you to my garage.  You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle — but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely.  “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.”  And so on.  I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?  If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?  Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.  Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.  What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.  The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head.  You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me.  The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind.  But then, why am I taking it so seriously?  Maybe I need help.  At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility.  Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded.  So you don’t outright reject the notion that there’s a fire-breathing dragon in my garage.  You merely put it on hold.  Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you’re prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you.  Surely it’s unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative — merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of “not proved.”

Imagine that things had gone otherwise.  The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch.  Your infrared detector reads off-scale.  The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you.  No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons — to say nothing about invisible ones — you must now acknowledge that there’s something here, and that in a preliminary way it’s consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me.  Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages — but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive.  All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence.  None of us is a lunatic.  We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on.  I’d rather it not be true, I tell you.  But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported.  But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking.  An alternative explanation presents itself.  On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked.  Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath.  But again, other possibilities exist.  We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons.  Such “evidence” — no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it — is far from compelling.  Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

ON SHAME AND SHAMELESSNESS

I never wonder to see man wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.– Jonathan Swift

Lee Kuan Yew

I stole this image from Jessica Zafra.

GOOD FRIDAY IN PAOAY CHURCH

It was late in the afternoon of Good Friday.  The crowd had just left to join the traditional procession around the town.

“CONFICKER” IS A SPAMMER’S TOOL

Last night the dreaded Conficker worm finally got the update we’ve been waiting for since April 1. But cyber Armageddon will have to wait another day. The botnet, as predicted here, is now dedicated to spam.

from Wired.

BEST TWISTS

The best film twists of all time

I go for Sixth Sense  if I were to name just one.

DUBAI: A MIRAGE IN THE DESERT?

The dark side of Dubai.

WHO THE HELL KILLED NINOY: SCIENCE VS. LEGAL EXPERTS

Two forensic scientists take to task the Supreme Court and former Chief Justice Art Panganiban, on the murder of Ninoy Aquino:

This is in reaction to former Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban’s March 15 column.

We are inviting readers, who are curious to find out why the nature of a bone in the skull figures prominently in the Aquino-Galman “double murder,” to read our forensic review of the case: “Death on the Tarmac: The Credible View.” In that report, we painstakingly proved that only Rolando Galman (not any one of the military escorts on the stairway) could have fired, on the tarmac, the shot that killed Ninoy Aquino.

The bone in question is the “Petrous part of the temporal bone.” The bone is so named because it is a hard compact bone, in fact the densest bone of the skull. (“Petrous” as in Peter the Rock, or petrified.)

It is understandable for the former chief justice to defend the Court that blocked the reopening of the case during his tenure as chief justice. He also happens to be the “author” of (or, more correctly, the compiler of essays in) a book titled “The Bio-age Dawns on the Judiciary,” which pompously trumpets to the world that the Philippine judiciary has entered the Modern Age of Science.

But for him and his scientifically uninformed/ misinformed Supreme Court colleagues to insist that what Justice Regino Hermosisima Jr. pontificated on about the Petrous bone (that “it is in fact a mere spongy bone akin to cartilage”), even after the error had been pointed out in our forensic report (copies of which were submitted to and hopefully read by the Supreme Court justices), betrays an obdurate and unforgivable ignorance or irremediable idiocy.

Instead of conferring with Hermosisima, Panganiban could have consulted a standard anatomy textbook or a reputable anatomy professor from a respected medical institution (even from the school where he finished his law degree) for a true enlightenment on the subject. Or more directly, he could have used his fingers to fully measure and feel this bone to find out if it had the consistency, softness and texture of a spongy substance or cartilage.

If Panganiban can cite a textbook or an anatomy professor that describes this bone as a “mere spongy substance, akin to cartilage,” we are willing to have all copies of our report burned.

In every forensic training seminar that we participate in, we never fail to point out that one of the weak pillars of our criminal justice system are judges (at all levels of the judiciary) who are either scientifically uninformed and cannot, or won’t—for (only God knows!) whatever non-judiciary considerations—appreciate the earnest efforts of forensic scientists.

—JEROME B. BAILEN,
UP associate professor (ret.),
forensic anthropologist;
BENITO E. MOLINO, MD,
International Human Rights
forensic consultant

Also, Who  Masterminded Ninoy’s Murder? by Artemio Pangilinan.

This is the Supreme Court resolution that says, sorry guys, it’s not Galman, we can’t be wrong!

Now, someone should hail these scientists for contempt of court.  “… obdurate and unforgivable ignorance or irremediable idiocy”… and “… judges (at all levels of the judiciary) who are either scientifically uninformed and cannot, or won’t—for (only God knows!) whatever non-judiciary considerations—appreciate the earnest efforts of forensic scientists”— hahaha, that’s some mighty loud slaps going left and right on the Mighty Infallibles’ faces until they turn blue, if you ask me.

I wrote So, who the hell killed Ninoy? I said, if indeed, Galman did it, you couldn’t imagine how damning and far-reaching the consequences would be especially to some treasured myths nurtured over the years.  So, rather than  face up to this unbearable truth, we’d better keep the lie.

For another,  aren’t we a nation in worship of the law profession?   (You just take a look at the yearly madness and extravaganza that attend the bar exams and the excessive attention and deference paid to lawyers, no matter if a lawless crook, or to students of law, no matter if  barely able to construct a sentence, let alone, carry an argument— if you do not see a reflection of a crude absurdity in our midst.)    The sciences? In the Philippines, who cares about a scientist if you can have a lawyer in the family? ( Btw, the result of the Bar is just out.  Start counting banners proclaiming to the world, this so and so schmoe just passed the Bar.  I wish they would care to indicate their respective scores so we will truly feel at peace and not assaulted by these).   In the case at bar, why do lawyers care about what the sciences have to say when they very well know they hold most everyone in awe of their “superior” minds?  You get the title Justice appended to your name, won’t your confidence soar a hundredfold more? Panganiban et al could well be saying: “We are the lawyers here,  people.  We hold the key.  Science, my ass!”  And we let it go because lawyers are simply the greatest in these parts and scientists are those smelly, unkempt, unappealing nerdy types clueless about and out of sync with the real world.