Shackleton: A Story of Endurance
Ernest Shackleton is best remembered for his outstanding leadership during a time of crisis than for the various explorations he led in the early 1900s. In August 1914 he set up an expedition aiming to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, cutting through across the South Pole. But before reaching his destination, his ship the Endurance became trapped in a pack ice in the Wedell Sea. After being stuck in the floating ice for ten months the Endurance was crushed between the drifting ice sheets and afterwards sunk. To many, being trapped in hundreds of miles of ice with limited food and water is a scenario so hopeless that thousands of seamen and explorers had in the past surrendered their courage and lost their lives in it, but to Shackleton hopelessness was not an option, and through a heroic display of courage and hope he turned their failure to cross the Antarctic into a legendary story of endurance and survival. Of the 27 crewmen he took with him, none lost their lives during the two harrowing years of living on the ice more than a thousand miles away from civilization.
When the Endurance sank, Shackleton and his team had no choice but to make a settlement on a floating ice floe where they lived for six months. Soon, when the floating ice began to break apart, they knew they had to get on their remaining boats, paddling for seven days from ice floe to ice floe until they arrived on the uninhabited Elephant Island.
With his crew already suffering from frostbite, scurvy, fever, cold, hunger and mental depression, Shackleton knew he had to act fast. Thus, he decided to go to the nearest known whaling station in the island of South Georgia (Antartica), setting out with five of his men on a dangerous open-boat journey aboard the James Caird (one of the last functional boats they had). He left the rest of his men in Elephant Island and vowed to return to rescue them. For 16 straight days he and his five crewmen rowed south across the Atlantic, reaching the nearest part of South Georgia after surviving episodes of ferocious storms, squalls and stress in the open ocean. Polar historian Caroline Alexander described this as one of the most extraordinary feats of seamanship and navigation in recorded history.
However, the boat landed on the wrong side of the island, and Shackleton and his men decided to take a very difficult 36-hour hiking through the snowy valley to get to the nearest whaling station at Stromness Bay on the other side, wading through miles and miles of snow and glacier across the island’s mountainous interior without any map, tent, sleeping bag and proper mountaineering equipment aside from a carpenter’s axe. Eventually they arrived at Stromness, and there Shackleton was able to borrow a ship and mount a rescue mission to save his men in Elephant Island, a mission which, after four attempts, proved futile. But soon Shackleton was able to contact London and four months later secured the survival of all his sailors, bringing them home to England in May 1917 aboard a rescue ship.
Shackleton was credited with saving his crew during their long ordeal which might have cost the lives of all of them. For this, despite his failure to cross the Antarctic and reach his goal, Shackleton and his crew were awarded the Polar Medal.
His ability to lead his men out of a seemingly hopeless adversity by continuously providing them the will to carry on and therefore endure became a classic example of excellent and inspiring leadership, and has ever since become a model used not only by soldiers and seamen but also adopted by managers in the corporate world.
What did Shackleton do to become a model, avert more disaster and therefore, reverse his failure into a story of exemplary leadership? [continue reading]
The Theatre of Wikileaks
As of this writing, Wikileaks’ Cablegate has published only a small fraction of its huge stockpile of diplomatic cables numbering more than 250,000, about 118,000 of which are classified either as secret or confidential correspondences between several US embassies around the world and the US State Department in Washington. These memos are yet to inflict a felt impact on the countries involved, however, that many of the cables revealed an assortment of long unheard-of ironies and absurdities in international politics makes it inevitable for statesmen and world leaders to either exercise caution or become more defiant in the light of the Cablegate revelations.
But it seems that Wikileaks is yet to post the real bombshell of an expose comparable to its 2007 leakage of a video of an American helicopter firing at civilians in a Baghdad neighborhood thereby killing two Reuters journalists, or it has published only selected memos which it deems are able to create quite a stir but don’t yet bring a major shocker that will rock monopolizing governments (has it saved the best ones for last?) For now Cablegate seems to focus mostly on being an anthology of embarrassing politics, aimed at the US government the fall guy of which (Hilary Clinton) is trying hard to let hackers understand that Cablegate is putting national and individual security at huge risk. Wikileaks’ soft-spoken founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange has told TIME’s Richard Stengel via Skype that in its four years of publishing history the whistle-blower website has never caused any individual “to come to any sort of physical harm or to be wrongly imprisoned.”
According to the website’s statistical graph, 1, 796 of the memos came from the US Embassy in Manila. This wikidump, which is the largest in Southeast Asia, dates from January 2005 to February 2010 and consists of 982 unclassified, 749 classified and 65 secret memos to Washington. While Wikileaks is yet to publish any of these memos, the Philippine media is anxiously standing by as any of its disclosures would prove instrumental in revealing the US’s perceptions and position on various issues and controversies confronting, or rather hounding, the Arroyo administration at the time. [read more]
Liham Para sa Isang OFW
Isang hapon
Ng Disyembre, sa kalagitnaan ng aking
Pagtataka sa langit ako ay nahimbing.
Napaniginipan ko ang aking sariling
Nagsusulat sa lilim ng isang toreng
Nilaspag ng sumasargong kidlat at ulan.
May kaunting liwanag bagamat makapal
Ang ulap na nakabitin sa itaas
Ng bilangguang malawak. Patuloy pa rin
Ang pagdurugo ng pluma at pagtawag
Ng talinghaga, nang sa aking pagbiling,
Sa aking paglingat, walang anu-ano’y
Yumanig ang lupa. Read on
The Poverty of Learning
I deplore the fact that among an unwieldy stream of textbooks coming out of the publishing houses every year, many escape critical peer reviews that should be the requirement of every manuscript prior to its entrance to the press. If ever they all did then I am very bewildered at the quality of the reviewers as a large number of Filipino-authored textbooks reaching public and private libraries and bookstores variably contain errors in some or in many parts. In institutions where professors and other members of the faculty are not critical to details (owing to their bookishness) these errors persist and create a well of misinformation for the students and the public, who are ought to carry the erroneous brand of knowledge to their children or their students and their graves.
Murdering the idyllic
Not long ago I was riding in a jeepney enjoying the idyllic Nueva Ecija farmlands which have been pitifully reduced to meters by the now thriving but nearly-ruined resorts, hotels and some subdivisions. I was glad that the natural canopy of acacias growing on both sides of the road remained intact, for I regard traveling under Mother Nature’s archway as one of the most precious scenes in my lifetime.
We were passing along a curve, and while being wrapped in my personal reflections usual during travel days I was suddenly roused by something awkward that seemed to have grown out from within the tree trunks. There was a frequency of them, one in every tree, and as I applied my sight nearer I could recognize the familiar face on them alongside a more familiar slogan.
Dammit. What was Bayani Fernando’s MMDA posters doing in Nueva Ecija?
A few days ago, as I was on the same road again passing along the same idyllic scenery, I happened to come across a funny-looking sign standing among the plentiful rice stalks. It spelled out the letters O, T, E and P into an acrostic, the meanings of which escaped me. There are also the same letters yet with a different set of meanings for the aerobics association association at the town plaza. (continue reading)
Of surveys on hunger and poverty: perceptions and reality
It is a sad truth that, given an economy which is taught to have inched its way further and has managed to cushion the impact of the global crisis (at least in this difficult season), our country is still caught in the sticky quagmires of hunger and poverty. Being the fifth hungriest out of the 55 countries surveyed by Gallup International’s Voice of the People, it makes me think what is really wrong with the system; whether the problem lies with the Filipinos’ contentment standards or with the counterweight of the inflated economy defeating any statistical improvements.
Gallup International indicated that between June and September 2008, 40% of Filipino citizens said they have experienced frequent hunger in the last 12 months. The Social Weather Station (SWS) has also reported that approximately 3.3 million household have suffered involuntary hunger during the same period. In addition, the National Statistics Coordination Board (NSCB) projected that there were 27.6 million poor Filipinos (32.9% of the total population) in 2006.
Considering also the over-all economic stability and growth which the President has been boasting of in her previous State of the Nation Addresses, here we will see both sides of the same coin presenting us with a picture of the Philippine economy from two vantage points, the macroscopic observation and microscopic observation.
Perhaps we can say that GMA’s description of the economy is not an overstatement, but those reported by surveys are not understatements either. Both of them relied on numbers which are hard facts, the only difference is that GMA’s indicators such as general growth in infrastructure, investment, agriculture etc. are too stiff and does not explain well the distributions of the elements and its effects on the growth of the classes, while on the other hand, popular surveys are more detailed, taking in consideration each individual status relevant to the scope of the needed information. The former suggest the situation according to the eyes of the observer, while the latter speaks of the condition according to the eyes of the observed. Currency and production are not enough indicators, for they fail to detect the great gap and disparity between the social classes amidst the projected over-all growth. They can tell you many things but they cannot tell you everything. They may tell you that the PSE is doing great at the moment, that the currency is gaining, or that the GDP is improving; they will tell you that the country is richer than ever. But what they cannot tell you is that only a small percentage, the upper class and a little of the middle class, reflects and enjoys this growth, while a significantly huge part of the population remains nigh or in the borderline of poverty and beneath. [continue reading]
Why we broke at the Olympics
Our failure at the Beijing Summer Olympics has received differing reactions both across the mainstream media and the blogosphere, prominent views amongst them are those which express dismay and blame the athletes for being either too confident or underestimating to the significance of rigorous practice.
Mind me, sports in the Philippines really took a dwindling status since the day it became one of the avenues of politicking including public relations, promotion of personalities, betting and gambling, and electioneering. Sports is being used as an instrument of blowing the egos of politicos stuffin’ our athletes with promises of material wealth and yes, for the love of money everything became commercialized from basketball to boxing, the reason why the Philippines cannot erect a monument of prominence in the world of the best sporting nations.
On Solar Sports I watched a teary athlete from our Olympic contingent complain that he was not given enough attention during his preparations. It is true that they were trained just months before the Games (Philippines Sports Commission Chairman Butch Ramirez admitted it), something quite portending of the results when compared to countries whose athletes had already been training for the events more than three years earlier. Worse, the Olympian said that he practiced in irregular periods with non-permanent trainors and monitormen, reflecting the situation of our delegates whose needs in the field were not given immediate support. They were treated insignificantly and left to themselves like hens expected to lay golden eggs after some time. Our strategies are very far from other nations’ which study with close scrutiny the performance of their players during practice, providing proper recommendations and additional facilities to improve them whenever necessary. It doesn’t need much money because the right mind would no doubt apply improvisation, as what contingents from poor countries in Africa and South America did which led them to exceptional successes that even broke records.[continue reading]
Based on what the MILF is doing in the past days we can conclude a picture of inhumanity complete with animosity and atrocious leadership they are likely to commit if ever they succeed to carve a self-governing pan-Islamic state out of Mindanao. I have always seen throughout history nations founded upon the blood of armies, rebels or secret societies, but never has such an act of using the people as human shields been untenable inasmuch as it reflects the true colors of the bandits’ agendum in raising up arms against the status quo state; that they are moving according to the MILF’s vested interest and nothing more, not of the people, neither of Islam. They are making a fallacious logic whenever they involve the name of God (Allah) in their tempestuous undertakings, a notable one being that in the deceptive Mess of Agreement of Ancestral Domains, which begins:
IN THE NAME OF GOD THE BENEFICENT, THE MERCIFUL
MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT ON THE ANCESTRAL DOMAIN ASPECT OF THE GRP-MILF TRIPOLI AGREEMENT ON PEACE OF 2001
Yes, they are extolling God before they go raiding towns, open firing on everyone and hacking innocent residents with machetes and burning homes down to the ground, then they hostage the remaining civilians and use them as human shields upon voicing retreat. I’ve never heard of George Washington, Simon Bolivar, José de San Martin or Andres Bonifacio doing the same thing back in the old “Enlightenment” days of countries. Perhaps in the Balkans Kosovar Albanians were harassed and used as human shields back in ‘99, but it was Slobodan Milosevic’s status quo government who allegedly carried them out. [continue reading]
The inchoate Bangsamoro Juridical Entity is the generic name of Iraq
Yes the GRP will not lose our sovereignty over Mindanao, but let us not be surprised when, as virtually a caretaker government, the Arroyo administration finds it necessary to stay in power with the pretext of upholding peace and order in the territory of the Bangsamoro.
Just how close have they studied the consequences of the preliminary agreement to be signed tomorrow by Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Hermogenes Esperon, Jr. and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front? Are the silenced people of the Moro “homeland” prepared to see themselves under a brand new government of military oligarchs who for years have stood their grounds against each other? The absence of an apparent leader will result to a war of factions similar to that froth of hostilities already brewing and spewing in Baghdad. The government who would be closely monitoring the juridical state endowed with a regional security force (that would surely be used as clannish or partisan bodyguards) will find it soon imperative to sound an alarm after threats of infantile destabilization in the Bangsamoro, paving the way to more breakaway groups and imminent extremism.
To understand the future of Mindanao we must understand its present status. The numbers of dissenting groups have long lurked in the shadows, and they are waiting for the slackening of the Moro ties to the GRP before they re-emerge into the political battlegrounds. History has it that what they cannot attain by law they struggle to take hold by force. I wonder how many of the 712 villages fear the same.[continue reading]
Are shopping malls really helping to boost a city’s economy?
I have no idea why the establishment of shopping malls are considered one of the indicators of an area’s eligibility to become a city (if you do have, kindly tell me in the comments section). I can well understand if it is for the aesthetic formation of a metropolis, but for the latter’s economy, I should say that it is an unpractical reason or idea in a country with a huge percentage of poverty.
Malls are big venues of trade and interchange, and almost all cities in the country accommodate various mall franchises which house branches of luxury stores from all over the planet, with a few little native products aggregated in a side to form the mall’s tiangge in some, but in most supermalls, the tiangge has lost its place.
This pours in a considerable amount of revenue, but what about the small businesses of local proprietors who got blurred behind the boom of incoming foreign goods? Are shopping malls really signs of a city’s good health? (Read More)
