Ayala-speak Monday, April 28, 2008
Jollijeep (noun).
1. a mobile food kiosk usually located on sidewalks or parking spaces in Makati City, Philippines - named after Jollibee, a popular food chain store in the Philippines.
Invest in a Jollijeep - then find a place where there are a lot of office workers looking for cheap but home cooked food.
Labels: Ayala, dictionary, food, jollijeep, Makati, Philippines
posted by Jojo Pasion Malig @ 6:12 PM,
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Who's Yo Daddy? Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Gabe at five months and a hefty nine kilos. Yep, he's got his mom's eyes.
Labels: fatherhood, gabriel justin
posted by Jojo Pasion Malig @ 1:17 PM,
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My Little Squirt Monday, March 10, 2008
Labels: gabriel justin
posted by Jojo Pasion Malig @ 9:50 PM,
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Lost At Sea Thursday, February 28, 2008
As you now know, the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines has decided to take an argumentum ad temperantiam regarding calls for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to resign.
I would surmise that a sidelight to their ten-hour special meeting went on like this:
Mindanao bishop: Let's build a new headquarters in Jolo.
Visayas bishop: No, let's build it in Cebu.
Luzon bishop: No, let's build it in Pangasinan.
After much wrangling, they arrived at a compromise and agreed to build it in the middle of the sea between Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.
Now you understand why we are all lost at sea.
In relation to the subject, I tried to verify it it was indeed Dante who once said that "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality."
I found out that it was not a direct quote, but rather, the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy's interpretation of one of the passages of the "Divine Comedy."
In the Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil, on their way to Hell, pass by a group of dead souls outside the entrance to Hell. These individuals, when alive, remained neutral at a time of great moral decision. Virgil explains to Dante that these souls cannot enter either Heaven or Hell because they did not choose one side or another.
They are therefore worse than the greatest sinners in Hell because they are repugnant to both God and Satan alike, and have been left to mourn their fate as insignificant beings neither hailed nor cursed in life or death, endlessly travailing below Heaven but outside of Hell.
This scene occurs in the third canto of the Inferno:
Here sighs and lamentations and loud criesOur bishops can read the original work in a language that Dante called Italian, which was based on the regional languages of Tuscany, Sicilian, some elements of Latin, and other regional dialects. It was a break from previous standards of publishing in only the languages of clerical liturgy of either Latin or Greek.
were echoing across the starless air,
so that, as soon as I [Dante] set out, I wept.
Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements,
accents of anger, words of suffering,
and voice shrill and faints, and beating hands -
All went to make a tumult that will whirl
forever through that turbid, timeless air,
like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls.
And I - my head oppressed by horror - said:
"Master [Virgil], what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?"
And he to me: "This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.
They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them -
even the wicked cannot glory in them."
And I: "What is it, master, that oppresses
these souls, compelling them to wail so loud?"
He answered: "I shall tell you in few words.
Those who are here can place no hope in death,
and their blind life is so abject that they
are envious of every other fate.
The world will let no fame of theirs endure;
both justice and compassion must disdain them;
let us not talk of them, but look and pass."
And I, looking more closely, saw a banner
that, as it wheeled about, raced on - so quick
that any respite seemed unsuited to it.
Behind that banner trailed so long a file
of people - I should never have believed
that death could have unmade so many souls.
After I had identified a few,
I saw and recognized the shade of him
who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.
At once I understood with certaintly:
this company contrained the cowardly,
hateful to God and to His enemies.
These wretched ones, who never were alive,
went naked and were stung again, again
by horseflies and by wasps that circled them.
The insects streaked their faces with their blood,
which, mingled with their tears, fell at their feet,
where it was gathered up by sickening worms.
Dante is credited with standardizing the Italian language and, with Tuscany dialect becoming the basis for what would become the official language of the entire country.
As for the neutral, I believe they are still languishing in Dante's Inferno.
Labels: arroyo, CBCP, Dante, Divine Comedy, false compromise, Italian, Kennedy, language, linguistics
posted by Jojo Pasion Malig @ 1:42 PM,
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The Military, Malacañang, And Nash Equilibrium Monday, February 25, 2008
Amid fresh coup rumors making rounds in the metro, Philippine National Police Director General Avelino Razon, Jr. and Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon led hundred of police officers and soldiers in staging a "unity walk" along EDSA today to show their support for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Political analysts are unsure on when and if the military and the police will abandon Arroyo. If push comes to shove, they will abandon the matron, some suggest. Meanwhile, the power plays that the Palace engage in with with the military and Congress remind me of the Nash equilibrium* formulated by Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr., the Princeton University mathematician whom we got acquainted with in the Russell Crowe film "A Beautiful Mind."
The game theory concept - placed within the context of the current status quo in the country - goes like this.
Malacañang, the military, the police, and Congress are locked in a Nash equilibrium as no one among them has the motivation to change the status quo by changing only his or her own strategy unilaterally. If one of them acts unilaterally, the move might constitute a loss instead of a gain. In fact you could even perhaps include Commission on Higher Education Chairman Romulo Neri and former Commissions on Elections chief Benjamin Abalos in the game. There are hints that Malacañang is willing to use Abalos as a sacrificial lamb in the ZTE scandal but remains hesitant to do so as the former Comelec chief knows far too much about the skeletons hidden inside Arroyo's closet.
Political scientist Robert Axelrod, in his 1984 book in "The Evolution of Cooperation," discusses the situation further. He arranged a tournament between computer programmes playing "Prisoners' Dilemma" style games that reward cooperation and punish betrayal. The computers would co-operate with one another and share a big pot. If one betrayed the other, the other can steal the pot. If both defected, they lost most of the pot.
How will the Nash equilibrium be ended?
Francis Fukuyama - whom ZTE deal star witness Jun Lozada says he has been reading of late - has this warning:
"There is a certain assumption that civil society, once having been damaged by the excessive ambition of government, will simply spring back to life like brine shrimp that have been freeze-dried, and now you add water to them and they become shrimp again. It is not something that you can take for granted."
Labels: arroyo, fukuyama, game theory, Nash equilibrium, social psychology
posted by Jojo Pasion Malig @ 9:10 PM,
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Hello MIG-21? Sunday, February 24, 2008
The Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism raised the issue of wiretapping anew in the wake of the recorded mobile phone conversations between the ZTE deal whistleblowers Jose "Joey" de Venecia III and Rodolfo Noel "Jun" Lozada.
A point of clarity - a rather long one.
The majority of software and hardware equipment of telcos’ infrastructures here are imported from overseas such as the United States and the equipment has been rendered wire-tap friendly to aid law enforcement in its effort to conduct surveillance of digital telephone networks.
In the past fifteen years, the United States government has led a worldwide effort to limit individual privacy and enhance the capability of its police and intelligence services to eavesdrop on personal conversations.
This campaign had two strategies. The first is to promote laws that make it mandatory for all companies that develop digital telephone switches, cellular and satellite phones and all developing communication technologies to build in surveillance capabilities; the second is to seek limits on the development and dissemination of products, both in hardware and software, that provide encryption, a technique that allows people to scramble their communications and files to prevent others from reading them.
Law enforcement agencies have traditionally worked closely with telecommunications companies to formulate arrangements that would make phone systems “wiretap friendly.” These agreements range from allowing police physical access to telephone exchanges, to installing equipment to automate the interception. Because most telecommunications operators were either monopolies or operated by government telecommunications agencies, this process was generally hidden from public view.
Following deregulation and new entries into telecommunications in the United States in the early 1990s, law enforcement agencies, led by the FBI, began demanding that all current and future telecommunications systems be designed to ensure that they would be able to conduct wiretaps. After several years of lobbying, the United States Congress approved the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994. The act sets out legal requirements for telecommunications providers and equipment manufacturers on the surveillance capabilities that must be built into all telephone systems used in the United States. In 1999, at the request of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an order was issued under CALEA requiring carriers to make available the physical location of the antenna tower that a mobile phone uses to connect at the beginning and end of a call.
In Australia the Telecommunications Act 1997 places obligations on telecommunications operators to positively assist law enforcement in the performance of their duties and to provide an interception capability. The costs of these obligations are borne by the operators themselves.[194] Furthermore, the 2001 Cybercrime Act allows executing officers to require a “specified person” with “knowledge of a computer or a computer system” to provide assistance in accessing, copying or converting data held on or accessible from that computer. Failing to provide this assistance is an offence punishable by six months imprisonment.
In the United Kingdom the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 requires that telecommunications operators maintain a “reasonable interception capability” in their systems and be able to provide on notice certain “traffic data.” It also imposes on obligation on third parties to hand over encryption keys. These requirements were recently clarified in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Maintenance of Interception Capability) Order 2002.
In the Netherlands, a new Telecommunications Act was approved in December 1998 that required that Internet Service Providers have the capability by August 2000 to intercept all traffic with a court order and maintain users logs for three months. The law was enacted after XS4ALL, a Dutch ISP, refused to conduct a broad wiretap of electronic communications of one of its subscribers. In New Zealand, the Telecommunications (Residual Powers) Act 1987 requires network operators to assist in the operation of a call data warrant (equivalent to the United States trap and trace or pen register warrant). An obligation to assist in the operation of a full interception warrant is now also being considered in New Zealand. The Telecommunications (Interception Capabilities) Bill currently being drafted by the Government would require all Internet Service Providers and telephone companies to upgrade their systems so that they are able to assist the police and intelligence agencies intercept communications. It would also require a telecommunications operator to decrypt the communications of a customer if that operator had provided the encryption facility.
In January 2002, a new Law on the surveillance of mail and telecommunications entered into force in Switzerland, requiring ISPs to take all necessary measures to allow for interception. In contrast, the Austrian Federal Constitutional Court held, in a decision in February 2003, that the law compelling telecommunications service providers to implement wiretapping measures at their own expense is unconstitutional. Most recently, Poland and New Zealand have been reported as proposing and adopting new laws requiring ISPs to monitor and record communications transactions.
International cooperation played a significant role in the development of these standards.In 1993, the FBI began hosting meetings at its research facility in Quantico, Virginia called the “International Law Enforcement Telecommunications Seminar” (ILETS).
The meetings included representatives from Canada, Hong Kong, Australia and the European Union. At these meetings, an international technical standard for surveillance, based on the FBI’s CALEA demands, was adopted as the “International Requirements for Interception.”
In January 1995, the Council of the European Union approved a secret resolution adopting the ILETS standards. Following this, many countries adopted the resolution into their domestic laws without revealing the role of the FBI in developing the standard. Following the adoption, the European Union and the United States offered a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for other countries to sign to commit to the standards. Several countries including Canada and Australia immediately signed the MOU. Others were encouraged to adopt the standards to ensure trade. International standards organizations, including the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the European Telecommunication Standardisation Institute (ETSI), were then successfully approached to adopt the standards.
The ILETS group continued to meet. Several committees were formed and developed a more detailed standard extending the scope of the interception standards. The new standards were designed to apply to a wide range of communications technologies, including the Internet and satellite communications. It also set more detailed criteria for surveillance across all technologies. The result was a 42-page document called ENFOPOL 98 (the European Union designation for documents created by the European Uni Police Cooperation Working Group).
In 1998, the document became public and generated considerable criticism. The committees responded by removing most of the controversial details and putting them into a secret operations manual that has not been made publicly available. The new document, now called ENFOPOL 19, expanded the type of surveillance to include “IP address (electronic address assigned to a party connected to the Internet), credit card number and E-mail address.” In April 1999, the Council proposed the new draft council resolution to adopt the ENFOPOL 19 standards into law in the European Union. The Council of Ministers revised the document and, in June 2000, approved a resolution calling for countries: “to ensure that, in the development and implementation - in cooperation with communication service providers - of any measures which may have a bearing on the carrying out of legally authorised forms of interception of telecommunications, the law enforcement operational needs…are duly taken into account.”
The annex for the document sets out detailed guidelines for interception requirements for “all telecommunications services, circuit and packet-switched, fixed and mobile networks and services.” It expands the coverage of the original International User Requirements (IURs) to now include networking technologies, without acknowledging that technologies such as computer networking generate more and greater details of information including web browsing and mobile location information and thus applying traditional surveillance analogies result in more intrusive surveillance.
Yes, Sen. Rodolfo Biazon. Globe, Smart, and Sun are wire-tap friendly.
*MIG-21 (Military Intelligence Group-21) is the Intelligence Services of the Armed Forces of the Philippines' special unit that specifically handles electronic intelligence.
Labels: ISAFP, MIG-21, PCIJ, wiretapping, ZTE scandal
posted by Jojo Pasion Malig @ 8:14 PM,
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A Rich Country Of Poor People Monday, February 11, 2008
Echoing Nobel Prize for economics winner Joseph Stiglitz's analysis on the promise and reality of globalization, we ask President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo if her claim that the economy's performance will hide the premise that the Philippines will be a rich country of poor people.
The economy grew 7.3% last year, according to the government, but the same statistical data from the state say that the average unemployment rate of 11.3% under her watch (2001 to 2007) was highest recorded in the country's history.
Economists describe the phenomena as jobless growth, wherein a country recovers from a recession but does not reduce unemployment.
Meanwhile, even though the economy improved last year, the share of manufacturing to the gross domestic product was only 23% - the lowest since the 1960s.
If we use the real GDP per capita standard as as an indicator of the average standard of living of people in the country, we find out the the Philippines is in 117th place in a list of 179 countries - each Filipino only producing around USD 1,590, which is just a fraction from that of Botswana (USD 7,270), Lebanon (USD 6,398), Kazakhstan (USD 6,314), Turkmenistan (USD 5,055), Angola (USD 3,738), Thailand (USD 3,400), Morocco (USD 2,368), and the Republic of the Congo (USD 1,931).
If we use the GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita or the value of all goods and services produced by a country in a given year divided by the average population for the same year and the purchasing power of the peso for a given basket of goods compared to other currencies, the Philippines is 105th in the list of the International Monetary Fund, and 127th in the list made by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Again, other countries in Asia and Africa are ahead of the Philippines on the list.
The GDP growth also fails to consider inflation, wherein the purchasing power of the peso has decreased in different proportion to the cost of goods and services. The 2006 Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) revealed that the average income for all families in real terms (at base year 2000) fell by PHP 20,400 from 2000 and 2006.
It likewise ignores income inequality, as the 2006 FIES revealed that share of the poorest 30% of the country's families comprised only around 8.6% of the total country's total income. In comparison the country's top 10% richest families counted for almost 36% of the national income. For every peso that the bottom 30% of poor families earn, the top 10% of the rich pocket PHP 7.53.
And what of the quality of life in the Philippines? Some 7% of Filipinos are not expected to survive past to age 40. Some 7.4% of adults are still illiterate, 15% do not have access to clean water, and nearly three in every ten children aged five years and below are underweight.
American economist Simon Smith Kuznets - a 1971 Nobel Prize winner in economics and acknowledged inventor of the GDP and the standardization of the measurement of the gross national product, told U.S. Congress, "The welfare of a nation [can] scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income."
He adds quite succintly:
Distinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth, between costs and returns, and between the short and long run. Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.
Labels: arroyo, cost of living, economy, GDP, GNP, HDI, income inequality, Kuznets, Philippines, PPP, quality of life, Stiglitz
posted by Jojo Pasion Malig @ 10:50 PM,
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Lessons In Logic Redux Saturday, February 09, 2008
Of course the speaker does not believe there are no alternatives otherwise he would not bother to argue the point; rather he opposes the alternatives and seeks to dismiss them by denying their existence.In days of Martial Law past, the government tried to force people to rally behind President Ferdinand Marcos when it claimed that communists will run the country into ruin if Marcos is removed from office. In days of ZTE present, the government tries to reemploy the logical fallacies of appeal to fear and appeal to consequences when it says that the opposition bloc will run the country into ruin if Arroyo is removed from office.
Who then do we replace Gloria with? Vice-President Noli de Castro can lead a caretaker government until the 2010 polls when senators Mar Roxas III, Francis Pangilinan, and Manny Villar can contest the seat.
Wikipedia tells us:
Ad hominem abusive (also called argumentum ad personam) usually and most notoriously involves insulting or belittling one's opponent, but can also involve pointing out factual but ostensibly damning character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent's argument. This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent's personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions. This tactic is frequently employed as a propaganda tool among politicians who are attempting to influence the voter base in their favor through an appeal to emotion rather than by logical means, especially when their own position is logically weaker than their opponent's.I am taking Apostol's rant personally as I am married to Chinese-Filipina and we have a three-month old son. Does Apostol expect me to respect him or Malacañang for uttering racist comments that insult not only Lozada but the entire Filipino-Chinese community as well?
No apologies are needed. Can the old man repeat what he said in the presence of his boss alongside Lucio Tan, Henry Sy, and John Gokongwei?
Labels: appeal to consequences, appeal to fear, arroyo, false dichotomy, Filipino-Chinese, frame, logic, marcos, racism, Sergio Apostol, ZTE scandal
posted by Jojo Pasion Malig @ 10:01 PM,
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