Today is Friday Janurary 30th, 2009 and it si now 10:15 PM here in the Philippines.
Pretty much back to "normal" as much as normal exists in this part of the world, so I will link to a couple of the videos I talked about in the last entry.
Dead Confederate is a group from outside of Augusta, Georgia near the South Carolina border and wrote the following song as a protest piece about Christian Fundamentalists, Anti-abortionists and intolerance in general. the song is called "The Rat" and is fantastic, bluesy kind of rock but with a real Alternative feel if that makes sense:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN055pYFGZs
The next song is probablly my favourtie right now, the British band Keane and the song is called "Spiralling," a great Alternative rock song:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-LZ7yH-JBM
I will get to the others prhaps in the next entry.
Have not had much time for books, though I do hope to reread the book I have read a couple of times, "E=MC2: The Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation" by David Bodanis which does a great job of explaining in relatively easy terms the ideas and work that went into this earth shaking equation.
I have had the pleasure of hearing Bodaris speak 2 times, once on this particular book although I never thought to try and weasel a book signing out of him. What a great and modest man he is. Really enjoy his thought processes.
Well, we finally found out what is what .This past Wednesday, Janurary 28th, the President, Gloria M. Arroyo came to the region, and the army hoped to confuse the NPA into stepping right into a large scale offencive.
Arroyo supposedly came because of the terrible flooding which has turned our village and 6 others into official Disaster Zones (although it is nothing like in the West, here it is a only a minimum of AID. 600 sacks of rice were handed out by the Army here yesterday, 200 of which I personally donated my damn self so it is really sad but let me stop before I buy the bullet I just ducked).
I have talked at length, in my old BL Journal about the terrible deforestation here. I am a Botanist (Ethno) by degree so I am particularly sensitive to plants, but I would hope most rational folks would be considerate or at least cognisant of all flora and fauna.
On one hand you have a long, long history of colonialism, with the Spanish having literally half a millenia exploiting the 7,107 islands of this nation, and then you had immediately after them, the Yanks for a rough 50 years or so. The Americans especially began to denude the land of all the most crucial things, like timber. Practically no Virgin Forest exists on any of these islands and now even 1st and 2nd Growth is being taken away as well. The result? Landslides, flooding, and all those goodies.
The monsoon this year has been super heavy, raining heavy now in fact and the flooding has been horrendous. We are much better off than most here because I am educated enough to take precautions on our farm lands so that our rice and corn fields will be better for the flooding, but most here are bankrupt because of it.
2 villagers have officialy died in the flood, 2 of many on the island and that is so much worse than flooded rice paddies. I count my blessings in many ways.
So, the army pulled out of the region evacuating my province, Agusan del Sur and the one that begins a kilometer or so east of me, Surigao del Sur. They advanced deep into Agusan del Norte all the way to the northern coast at Butan and then west woards Nasapit, aout 10 kilometers up the Coastal Hiway.
They had hoped that the NPA would come out of the mountains in full, and to a very small degree they had limited success. The NPA did not come in open formations but they did come in under cover of night over the last 2 evenings (not tonight).
Then, as they were in the villages under cover of night last night, the AFP came back in full force.
CAFGU, the offical governmental paramilitary never pulled out, and had been fortified in key points like our municipal building on National Hiway, and key infrastructural points. In addition the Lademora (fuck it, what is a name, right?) paras were of course itching for a fight, and were well dug in and what is most suprising of all was the coordinated effort put forth, which is incredibly rare here.
Using gunships and bombers the army was able to cut off key points of retreat back into Surigao and on the other sides south into ComVal and again on the north into Prosperidad. They left the western routes alone so as to drive the projected retreat along that heading.
I will continue shortly...
Pretty much back to "normal" as much as normal exists in this part of the world, so I will link to a couple of the videos I talked about in the last entry.
Dead Confederate is a group from outside of Augusta, Georgia near the South Carolina border and wrote the following song as a protest piece about Christian Fundamentalists, Anti-abortionists and intolerance in general. the song is called "The Rat" and is fantastic, bluesy kind of rock but with a real Alternative feel if that makes sense:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN055pYFGZs
The next song is probablly my favourtie right now, the British band Keane and the song is called "Spiralling," a great Alternative rock song:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-LZ7yH-JBM
I will get to the others prhaps in the next entry.
Have not had much time for books, though I do hope to reread the book I have read a couple of times, "E=MC2: The Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation" by David Bodanis which does a great job of explaining in relatively easy terms the ideas and work that went into this earth shaking equation.
I have had the pleasure of hearing Bodaris speak 2 times, once on this particular book although I never thought to try and weasel a book signing out of him. What a great and modest man he is. Really enjoy his thought processes.
Well, we finally found out what is what .This past Wednesday, Janurary 28th, the President, Gloria M. Arroyo came to the region, and the army hoped to confuse the NPA into stepping right into a large scale offencive.
Arroyo supposedly came because of the terrible flooding which has turned our village and 6 others into official Disaster Zones (although it is nothing like in the West, here it is a only a minimum of AID. 600 sacks of rice were handed out by the Army here yesterday, 200 of which I personally donated my damn self so it is really sad but let me stop before I buy the bullet I just ducked).
I have talked at length, in my old BL Journal about the terrible deforestation here. I am a Botanist (Ethno) by degree so I am particularly sensitive to plants, but I would hope most rational folks would be considerate or at least cognisant of all flora and fauna.
On one hand you have a long, long history of colonialism, with the Spanish having literally half a millenia exploiting the 7,107 islands of this nation, and then you had immediately after them, the Yanks for a rough 50 years or so. The Americans especially began to denude the land of all the most crucial things, like timber. Practically no Virgin Forest exists on any of these islands and now even 1st and 2nd Growth is being taken away as well. The result? Landslides, flooding, and all those goodies.
The monsoon this year has been super heavy, raining heavy now in fact and the flooding has been horrendous. We are much better off than most here because I am educated enough to take precautions on our farm lands so that our rice and corn fields will be better for the flooding, but most here are bankrupt because of it.
2 villagers have officialy died in the flood, 2 of many on the island and that is so much worse than flooded rice paddies. I count my blessings in many ways.
So, the army pulled out of the region evacuating my province, Agusan del Sur and the one that begins a kilometer or so east of me, Surigao del Sur. They advanced deep into Agusan del Norte all the way to the northern coast at Butan and then west woards Nasapit, aout 10 kilometers up the Coastal Hiway.
They had hoped that the NPA would come out of the mountains in full, and to a very small degree they had limited success. The NPA did not come in open formations but they did come in under cover of night over the last 2 evenings (not tonight).
Then, as they were in the villages under cover of night last night, the AFP came back in full force.
CAFGU, the offical governmental paramilitary never pulled out, and had been fortified in key points like our municipal building on National Hiway, and key infrastructural points. In addition the Lademora (fuck it, what is a name, right?) paras were of course itching for a fight, and were well dug in and what is most suprising of all was the coordinated effort put forth, which is incredibly rare here.
Using gunships and bombers the army was able to cut off key points of retreat back into Surigao and on the other sides south into ComVal and again on the north into Prosperidad. They left the western routes alone so as to drive the projected retreat along that heading.
I will continue shortly...