There’s no truth to the rumor that former US Vice-President Al Gore will be in Manila on June 8th in order to give us the juicy details of his very recent separation with his longtime wife Tipper Gore… nor is there any truth to the rumor that Al Gore is here to lecture our losing candidates about the dangers of automated counting machines and how to expose them to the public. Nope, he also isn’t coming to Manila to help former Pres. Joseph “Erap” Estrada in his election protest.
I’m sure that Mr. Albert Arnold “Al” Gore the 45th US Vice-President under Pres. Bill Clinton is coming to Manila to sell his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” (this won an Academy Award in 2007) that was taken from the book he wrote “An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergence of Global Warming and What we can do about it.” I’m also sure that most of us Filipinos have probably seen his documentary through many pirated DvD discs available in your nearest neighborhood video pirate and this my friends is truly a very inconvenient truth about Film piracy in this country!
One of the big awards Al Gore bagged was the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 that he got together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unfortunately, I can’t attend this forum with Al Gore because of pressing schedules back home. However I do have a serious question about Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as he used Professor Michael E. Mann (an American Climatologist) controversial “Hockey Stick Graph or Theory” that the IPCC highlighted which earned them the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
On Oct.7, 2009, the Financial Post, National Post of Toronto, Canada featured an article entitled “The Hockey Stick Myth” written by Lorne Gunter that featured Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross Mckitrick who declared that out of the 112 data the Prof. Mann used, 105 of them were incomplete, flawed or incorrect declaring the Hockey Stick theory as a statistical nonsense as the chart revealed collation errors, obsolete data and other serious defects.
So the question I would like you folks to ask Mr. Gore is . . . what is the inconvenient truth about the Hockey Stick Graph that was already debunked right after his documentary was viewed worldwide? Does this mean that what he is telling us about Global Warming isn’t really the whole truth, but merely an inconvenient one?
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Call me an ultra-conservative, but I’m four-square totally against Sex Education to be taught in our schools, simply because this is the job and duty of parents to teach their children on the so-called Birds and the Bees. I submit that my parents came from a very conservative Catholic family that didn’t have the heart to teach us about the rudiments about sex and we can only blame this on their own parents who also didn’t teach them about sex. But hey, we came out right . . . after all, the schools then taught us one of the best subjects we’ve every learned, “Good Manners and Right Conduct.” Alas, it is no longer taught in our schools today.
But remember that our parents lived in another time, when children were only supposed to be seen, not heard. Parenting today is far different from the way our parents brought us up. Today, children (especially my grandchildren) are brought up so differently from the way we were brought up, thanks to mass media like Television and of course the Internet, where many kids learn to use at a very young age. Chances are your children would end up seeing a love scene from YouTube, which often is not censored before you could find the chance or the guts to talk to them about sex.
I’m not comfortable handing over Sex Education to our schools, where parents have no idea about the background of the teacher who will be teaching their children about sex. What if that teacher assigned to your kids is a prude or worse a sex maniac?
As I told you, I didn’t learn sex from my parents however I submit that I learned it from school, but not as a subject, rather from my classmates who already experience it during our High School days. This is why most of our High School buddies end up closer to us in our older years than our college classmates because chances are, we learned about sex together.
It’s the month of June and we can expect many June brides, so let me say that teaching Sex education takes away that very intimate moment between mother and daughter who before the wedding night, often talks on the subject of how to handle a husband. Chances are the bride-to-be already knows about sex or done it already, but if the mother knows that her daughter took Sex education in school, there isn’t really much they can talk about.
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For e-mail responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mozcom.com or vsbobita@gmail.com. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.