Anthony Lopez-Vito

It's only a webgame. What's interesting to me is how Britain's popular consciousness reflects on its present day government's totalitarian tendencies. If the media is a window on society, clearly people do acknowledge how things might be if they continue to choose security over freedom.

Those keeping an eye on the Philippine news would probably have noticed regular reports about the rising tally of gun ban arrests. Encouraged by its apparent success, the Chief of PNP is pushing to have it made permanent. Of course, he is also doing this because of the 'overwhelming clamor' from the people for more gun control.

This is propaganda. The facts do not support his claims. I know because I started a project to create an independent database of violent crime incidents during the gun ban. So far, volunteers have recorded over 300 injuries and 440 fatalities due to violent crime between January and May 2010. The ban did not help any of these victims.

Lies, damn lies and ERVIs

Of course, statistics are easily manipulated to fit any point-of-view. The problem with the official figures are that only election-related violence incidents (ERVIs) are counted. That does not take into account what happens to over-all violent crime during the gun ban period. Also, since the country does not live under a permanent state of election fever, there is no reason why ERVIs should be used as a metric to decide a permanent ban.

The proposal to extend the ban comes after series of sudden moves to tighten firearms controls. As usual, the public is supposed to believe that these steps are all geared to make us safer. But why is the PNP feeding us with information that is blatantly wrong? Some of us pro-firearms and liberty-minded people see this trend as somewhat suspicious.

The authoritarian nature of anti-gun

In light of all this, the pro-gun groups are now up in arms. (Figuratively, of course.) They are now getting organized and starting their opposition by releasing to the media their statements against the ban. The situation took a malevolent turn on 27 May with an article published in the Manila Bulletin.

The Chief of PNP is quoted as saying, "There now appears to be some sectors that do not want a gun ban [so] maybe let's check the background of these sectors or these individuals that are giving unnecessary comments."

This simple statement should send alarm bells ringing. Background check? Unnecessary comments? The threat is plain enough for anyone but the most naive. It is a phrase that evokes not-quite-buried memories of dictatorship and political repression. Why should anyone peacefully protesting undergo a background check? Is freedom of speech in the Philippines to be regarded as 'unnecessary comments'? I'm afraid that in one statement, our Chief of Police has shown his true authoritarian nature.

We should always be wary when our leaders start taking away the ability to defend ourselves. The true motives rarely correspond with their outward claims. Firearms control is the biggest but most insidious threat to freedom in our country. History provides us with a consistent lesson: people control and firearms control always go hand-in-hand. Always.

According to Daniel Pink, three factors lead to better performance and personal satisfaction:

• Autonomy
• Mastery
• Purpose

While our Philippine lawmen are busy trying to restrict the freedoms of ordinary Filipinos, the Americans are steadily strengthening the rights of their citizens.

On May 20, the Service Member Second Amendment Protection Act of 2010 was enacted to the United States Senate. The bill protects the rights of Armed Forces and Department of Defense civilian employees by prohibiting any requirement to register privately owned firearms.

This ruling follows on from a wave of pro-firearms laws in the USA such as:

• the overturning of Washington DC's ban on handguns
• allowing concealed firearms carry in national parks
• expanding the lawful use of deadly force in self-defense
• Right-to-Carry reform and the growing number of "Shall-issue" states

Legislators in the US are realizing that gun control, just like alcohol prohibition, does more harm than good. How long will it take before those in the Philippines come to their senses?

In the hope of avoiding violence during the 2010 general elections, the Philippines was put under a nationwide total gun ban for the period between January 10 and June 9. The ban, according to Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief General Jesus Verzosa, has been such an effective crime deterrent that they are considering a permanent total gun ban.

His statement seems brush aside reports from the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) that the 2010 elections are turning out to be the most violent. As with other gun control adherents, he also ignores is the fact that there have been no cases anywhere in the world where a ban has effectively prevented criminals from obtaining weapons.

It is a fact that the gun ban failed to stop violent criminals from murdering hundreds of people during the 5 months since it started. Further, many of the much publicized arrests were made up of—had it not been for the ban—otherwise legal gun holders.

This development comes in the wake of a series of moves to tighten firearms controls, such as the ludicrous ban on inside-waistband carry and an attempt to reclassify airsoft replicas as firearms. As usual, the public is supposed to believe that these steps are all geared to make us safer.

Some of us, however, may find this trend somewhat suspicious, and rightly so; those who look at history know that one of the first steps of the aspiring autocrat is to disarm the population. The Philippines may not be at risk of another Ferdinand Marcos just yet, but someone is pulling our government's strings.

One of the things that characterises the Filipino parenting style is a focus on academic success. For Filipino parents, education is crucial and subsequently, the brightest children are placed on a pedestal while those with bad grades get strong reprimands. This, I think, can lead to a strong fear of failure. Rather than taking on the more difficult challenges, children who wish to please their parents quickly learn to opt for those that have the highest chance of success. After all, good grades led to praise whereas failure only means a taste of tsinelas.

Filipino schools just add to the problem. Pressure from both parents and administration make teachers very reluctant to fail students. An industry professional who was offered a teaching job recently commented, "One of the reasons I refused [the job] is that if I fail 80% of the class [who were underachievers], I would be kicked out. Incredible. Raise the standards, and you get the boot. Keep them low, and you stay on forever."

Failure: a key ingredient for innovation

Ironically, the Filipino parent's over-emphasis on success may restrain excellence and encourage mediocrity. It could help to explain many of the challenges our country faces. Maybe rather than being afraid of failure, we should accept it as being one of the key ingredients for innovation. Poor students should fail but we should also reward those who bounce back after hitting the dirt.

According to Randy Nelson, dean of Pixar University, the core skill of an innovator is error recovery, not failure avoidance. Perhaps if we change our attitude to failure, we may help raise a generation of innovators for the Philippines.

Edutopia video

"Pixar University's Randy Nelson explains what schools must do to prepare students for jobs in new media." http://www.edutopia.org/

This was posted in the Phil-UK blog on 8th February 2009.

Judge Jim Gray on why we need to rethink drug laws.

The news and TV have ended up taking serious threats to society and exaggerating and distorting them. In the process, we have become paranoid.

A debate between Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio and Michael Badnarik, 2004 Libertarian Presidential Candidate.

“The key to freedom is to be able to have the ability to defend yourself and if you don't have the tools to do that, then you're going to be at the mercy of whomever wants to put you away”

I'm not sure why but this attitude is prevalent in our industry.

Update: Mosso was rebranded as The Rackspace Cloud in June 2009.

Update 1 Jan 2010: It looks like Rackspace has fixed the problem with Mosso's Scheduled Tasks. Anonymous' comment tipped me off that you can now set the command language to http, then enter your site's cron.php as the command to run.

Paulo Coelho speaks at the Digital, Life, Design in Munich. He tells of how pirating his own book increased sales in Russia from 1,000 copies per year to more than a million copies. His most interesting point, though, is that "the blessing of the internet is increased human contact." Tim Harford echoes this in chapter seven of his book, The Logic of Life. It's become clear that rather than causing people to be come isolated, the internet actively encourages more human contact.

Link:

“
In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace.”

Drupal can be a pain. After a whole day of development, we started getting 'Access Denied' errors on all content that should be accessible by the anonymous user. The cause turned out to be something to do with a module incorrectly altering the node_access table.

Running this query fixed it: