In the late 1980s until the early 1990s, the Communist Party of the Philippines launched a nation-wide and Party-wide internal purging of members suspected of being government and military agents. Estimates vary on the number of people who got mowed down by the rampaging political paranoia that swept the leadership of the Party. An organisation ( Read more... )

You know the universe is askew when the latest political whistle blower to come out of the woodwork likens himself to a Jedi, and his abetting of the administration's corrupt practices to the lure of the dark side ( Read more... )

I'm still here. I haven't dropped out from the Net (again!). I've been musing about names, the nature of names, the meaning and power behind people's names, prompted by thoughts about the latest members of our small clan, brother #1's baby girl and husband's sister #4's baby boy. How neat it is to be an aunt seven times over. I was thinking this ( Read more... )

35 years ago, humans landed on the moon.

Supposedly.

One of the first flamewar I had the misfortune of witnessing and being caught in the ashfall was a discussion about how NASA faked the Apollo 11 landing, which was instigated by a high school batchmate in our alumni mailing list. It was pretty intense, and a total waste of greymatter. sagarmin, do you ( Read more... )

This is the church in the town where I grew up, a former Spanish settlement founded in the late 1500s. Like all former Spanish colonial settlements, my hometown had been originally built to grow with the Catholic Church as its literal and metaphoric centre.

( Church of Pope Gregory )

While digging through the archive of my organisation's site, I found this old piece of writing. I remember writing it as a post to the organisation’s mailing list, but I didn't know that someone thought it worthy of being archived. I was prepared to shudder my way through reading it. I wrote it way back in 1996, when i was just starting to obsess ( Read more... )

The WENT caravan is taking a pit stop today for activities to commemorate the workshop's fifth year anniversary. I'm sitting here inside this small auditorium, listening to symposium speakers discuss about women, power and technology.

As headbint of the training team I was wrangled to deliver the opening remarks for the symposium.

( Here be 710 words duct taped together at the 11th hour. )

(this is a re-hash of a blog entry posted sometime in October, 2002 ( Read more... )