benign0's blog

New Year toast to the contributors and commentors of Get Real Philippines!

2011-12-31T10:39:00.003+11:00

I'd like to take the time to extend my thanks to the men and women who set apart the Get Real Philippines Network and communities from the rest of the noise of the Philippine National "Debate".

I find that a lot of the really great commentary I’ve seen are from people who have an “outsider’s” perspective. This does not mean, however, that good commentary comes mainly from foreigners or people who reside outside the Philippines. A large number of commenters and contributors here are native Filipinos and residents but somehow still manage to cognitively step back and regard the picture like an outsider — which is remarkable because that (moving from an insiders’ to an outsiders’ perspective) requires a leap of imagination and intuition not normally found in the average Filipino.

To the people who not only seek to lend their thinking and voices to uplifting the national debate, but aspire to do so by applying imagination, originality, and rigour in their thinking, salud! Have a safe and happy New Year!

[NB: This post was inspired by and parts of it lifted from a comment I made on Get Real Post today.]

Kudos to Kanin Club restaurant!

2011-10-10T00:29:00.003+11:00

I'm not a food writer by any stretch of the imagination, but I just have to do a hats-off to this resto Kanin Club. I had the pleasure of having lunch at their Westgate Mall, Alabang branch one weekend and it was by far the best meal I had during my short stay in Manila.

If I recall right, I had a green mango salad (I forget what it is called), some sort of grilled talong (eggplant) thing-a-ma-bob, some tinola (chicken soup), and what looked like a deep-fried tilapia that had been pulled apart into a flower-like sculpture. The turon (deep-fried banana, I think it is) topped by a scoop of mango ice cream was great too.

Just makes me wonder how Filipino food can be packaged so well within the country yet fail to make waves overseas the way Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian and, of course, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese do.

There's a challenge for us.

English vs Tagalog - Manuel Buencamino comes out a chump telling James Soriano off

2011-09-08T15:12:00.004+10:00

As usual, ProPinoy.net resident Mr Important is trying to be cute in his latest blurb where he presumes to tell current hero of the Illustrado class, James Soriano a thing or two. Too bad that thing -- even two of it -- falls short on sense. Nice try, Mr Manuel Buencamino. But do think again.

English is just another means of communication.

That is true -- among a people who have strong traditions of scientific, technological, and commercial achievement. Thus among successful societies, it does not matter whether you speak English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Swedish, or Singlish. These languages -- and the people who speak them -- are peers among themselves.

But when we add Tagalog into that mix, then it does matter. Because between speaking in Tagalog and speaking in English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Swedish, or Singlish, clearly the Tagalog speaker will be at a disadvantage -- because Tagalog is incomplete. There is no Tagalog word for efficiency, for example.

Perhaps among German, Japanese, and Chinese speakers, English speakers will be mere peers. But among people who speak Tagalog -- or Cebuano, or Ilocano, or Tausog -- English speakers will always be special, because all things being equal, English speakers will always have first shot at that high-paying white collar job in Makati, will have first shot at that promotion, will have first shot at that junket to Silicon Valley, and will have first shot at that statuesque fair-skinned colegiala sipping a a latte while tapping on her iPhone in Starbucks.

A Hermes handbag will not get you into the salons of the old rich, but then who wants to?

Bottom line is, becoming proficient in the English language will vastly improve most ordinary Filipino schmoes' ability to compete with those privileged enough to have been born to old money. That means that the old Atenistas (sige na nga, and La Sallistas na rin) will, for the first time in the history of this sad nation be given a run for their money by an entire generation of English speakers graduating from that hypothetical Philippine public education system that had finally chucked the old "national language" into the rubbish bin and focused its meagre resources instead to the language of winners.

Indeed, Buencamino inadvertently highlighted the very point I've been making for much of my online career -- that English is a language of privilege and opporunity monopolised by the Philippine elite.

That Buencamino would assume that Soriano's goal is to bandy around his English speaking skills like a Hermes bag-toting socialite wannabe reflects the classic typically-Pinoy underclass mentality. You can't really teach minds infested with underclass mentalities to get the sort of points Soriano makes.

In the Philippines, "we do not print textbooks in our native language."

Absolutely right, Mr Buencamino. So imprisoning the Philippine masses in a language (or whatever local dialects we remain fixated to) that utterly and consistently fails to attract scholarly authors is like double whammying an already wretched majority chunk of our collective intelligence.

With every sentence you bang out of your keyboard, you merely highlight the overall futility of those who continue to prop up a language (or dialects) more associated with underprivilege than with the "pride" in "country" that we imagine it to embody.

We all acquired the belief that "Pilipino" is "inferior" and that it is the "language" of our streets by ourselves, Mr Buencamino

Indeed, it does not take an expert to work out that the poor sods who can't string even a two-word English sentence together to save their mother's life are less likely to work their way out of a mail room than their Arrrneo-accented counterparts in the office.

And, yes...

Unlike Hong Kong people, Filipinos cannot afford to hire college-educated maids who can speak anything other than a domestic language or dialect.

That is because we are a society with an entire way of life built on the back of cheap labour. Every spare hour we have to nurse our lattes to room temperature in the local Starbucks, for example, is made available to us by a poor probinsyana ironing our faux designer clothes in a mosquito-infested corner of our village houses. The trouble with cheap is that we get cheap. And we get cheap, because we deprive an entire sector of our society -- those unfortunate enough to be subject to a public education system that has to allocate precious resources to delivering instruction and material in a no-results language -- the chance to compete by arming them with full access to a language that levels the playing field.

And I can't agree with Mr Buencamino more when he says that...

To speak English and to be learned is not the same thing.

Of course. There is no causal relationship between learnedness and English proficiency. The causal relationship lies between English proficiency and opportunity. English opens doors for its best speakers to a world of achievement in science, technology, and commerce that trades in knowledge overwhelmingly articulated in English. That said, I'll be the first to point out that even among English speakers, there are very very few truly insightful minds among them. But the reality is that even stupid English speakers are more likely to get ahead than smart Tagalog speakers. You need not look further than Philippine politics and our entertainment industry to appreciate the Truth in that.

Women should be allowed to take their place among the boys of the Roman Catholic Church

2011-08-20T22:24:00.003+10:00

In my own personal experience, I have for often observed and compared households and families, mainly around relative degrees of religiosity between husband and wife. Based on my small sample size and my armchair evaluation, I find that in instances where, between husband and wife in a household, it is the man who is more religious, the family as a whole tends to be more stressed or suffer from strained relationships amongst its family members than in households where the husband is less religious compared to the wife.

I've always had this unsubstantiated feeling that there is something profoundly not natural or out of whack about men being overly religious. Then my thoughts extend to instances of atrocities committed throughout history by the zealously religious, and it hit me: Perhaps men have a stronger inclination to pervert religious practice compared to women. Could it be that a fundamental problem with big modern organised religions today has to do with how men overwhelmingly dominate their officiation?

Something that we take for granted in a society such as ours that aspires to join the ranks of the modern world -- one where gender equality is upheld -- is how in our midst is a major institution that continues a medieval tradition of excluding women from key positions within its hierarchy. Indeed, that bastion of Roman Catholicism, the Vatican, described a 2008 move by the Anglican Church to allow women to be ordained bishops as "a step backwards"...

The Pontifical Council for Christian Unity said it had learnt of the Church of England's decision "with regret", and warned that it would have "consequences for future dialogue, which until now has been very fruitful".

"This decision is a breach with the apostolic tradition maintained by all Churches from the first millennium, and for that reason it is a further obstacle for reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Church of England."

That a practice or tradition dates back "from the first millenium" makes said practice necessarily right is typical of the sort of arguments that Church leaders continue to be quite comfy with.

Perhaps allowing women to take their place among the men in the Church hierarchy could present a positive step towards turning the Church into a more humanist institution -- one that behaves less like a warlike boys club and a bit more like an institution that represents the interests of those among us who need that representation the most.

A social experiment to be performed on the commentor known as 'GabbyD'

2011-07-28T10:51:00.003+10:00

Most people in the small subset of the Philippine blogosphere that I have come to know best in the last several years are familiar with a commentor who goes by the name "GabbyD". The following is a little social experiment I proposed to him in reply to the most recent of his typically non-added-value commentary.

Hey I've got an idea, GabbyD. How about we run an online experiment that goes like this:

(1) I put all comments of yours subsequent to this in the Spam queue.

(2) You go off and get up on your soapbox elsewhere (say, somebody else's blog) and announce to the world how the Admins of GR Post don't practice "free speech" here.

(3) We both sit back for the next couple of weeks (or years) and see if:

(3.a) anyone out there actually cares about what you have to say about our Admin practices here; and,
(3.b) anyone of the regular commentors here in GR Post actually miss your presence and clamor for a reinstatement of your comments.

I think the above little experiment will be good for a few laughs.

What do you think?

======
Some small print for you to take note of before you reply:

- "Yes" or "No" will be acceptable responses to the above proposal
- A "Yes" answer will put the above proposed experiment in effect immediately (the period over which it will be effective will be revealed after said experiment takes effect).
- A "No" answer will, effective immediately, subject any further comments you will make to criteria that will be applied in a decision to retain or mark your comments as Spam once in effect. This criteria is applicable only to YOU and subject to arbitrary modification by GR Post admins based entirely on our whim.
- Any other response to this comment (beyond the recommended Yes or No) will be interpreted as a "Yes" (and the proposed experiment subsequently put into effect).

Your move. :D

Abangan ang susunod na kabanata...

A fine specimen of an apologist ranting on behalf of Noynoy Aquino's 2011 SONA

2011-07-27T20:14:00.007+10:00

Poor Manuel Buencamino. The title of his latest article on ProPinoy.net alone already sufficiently describes the sort of attitude that apologists of Philippine President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III tend to take. In "A clear message. Period", Buencamino makes his appeal to the public on how they should regard Noynoy's recently concluded State of the Nation Address (SONA) delivered to joint sessions of Congress -- the message is clear, basta it is! End of conversation, right gramps?

More important is the underlying character about the typical Filipino mindset that the following excerpt from Buencamino's article reveals. Referring to critics' generally consistent observations that the SONA lacked vision, Buencamino's apology reads thus:

It’s easy to deliver a SONA with a vision that comes with a blueprint. The world does not lack policy wonks. And President Aquino could have hired a whole school of them to come up with a speech that would give wonks an orgasm. But titillating wonks is not what he set out to do. He was more interested in talking directly to the nation. So he spoke to them in the national language, about things they care about.

Indeed, Filipinos being Filipinos do not care for the future nor embrace it. This has long been evident, even to Jose Rizal himself. This nest of atrophied foresight that is Philippine society is a perfect audience to the highlighting of spilt milk fiesta that is the SONA and the drivel of apologists such as Buencamino.

Interestingly enough, Buencamino included in his article, some links to the SONA "Technical Report" then proceeds to use these to "challenge" his challenged readership:

Now, to those still unable to comprehend what the SONA was all about, I suggest they read the president’s budget message and comb through his budget. It’s the roadmap. I hope they can read maps.

Perhaps to Buencamino's consternation, someone did rise up to that challenge, no less than consultant Ben Kritz who, for his part had come up with a succinct but comprehensive analysis of that "Technical Report" in his piece The Second SONA of Noynoy Aquino: Highlights from the Technical Report which was published before Buencamino's lame SONA apology came out on ProPinoy.net.

To Kritz's comment...

Yeah, it’s a road that leads straight over a cliff, if the enormous increase in the zero-results CCT program (which I hear is riddled with corruption, e.g. employed people on eligible lists, etc.) is any indication. That’s not a program. That’s not a plan. That’s a band-aid solution, and not even a good one at that.

...this is all Buencamino had to say:

Benigno,

Get Real! Pa Ben Kritz-Ben Kritz ka pa diyan. I smell rotten tilapia!

Classy.

One thing's for sure, being accused of being an alter-ego of the esteemed Ben Kritz is something I'll take as a compliment.

There is of course a bigger lesson to be learned in the way Noynoy Aquino apologists such as Manuel Buencamino conduct themselves. It is a lesson that Aquino is slowly learning as he continues to warm the vastly diminished seat he sits on in Malacañang -- that sometimes it is the people who surround you who will ultimately be your undoing.

By the way, Mr Buencamino, here is a comment of mine that remains under moderation on ProPinoy.net as of this writing:

Hey MB, I’ll take you’re [sic] speculating that I am Ben Kritz as a compliment. But do keep on guessing. That’s what two-bit bloggers like you do best.

The about-face of Bagong Alayansang Makabayan (BAYAN)

2011-06-05T23:09:00.006+10:00

Ok, help me figure this out. Militant commie group Bagong Alayansang Makabayan (translated "New Nationalist Alliance" - BAYAN for short) is a top preacher of the doctrine of America as source of all the world's evils. So what's up with this placard?

And since when did "solidarity" with the "jobless of America" coming from anyone in the Philippines for that matter make any sort of sense?

What separates the men from the boys: When people with something critical to say remain silent

2011-05-27T23:36:00.006+10:00

Every now and then I get news about the who's-who (and some who think they are a who who's a who) of various message forums and online groups "grumbling" about the success of GRP, its network of bloggers, and its community of critical no-nonsense thinkers who've gravitated around its cutting-edge insight, and the profile we've so far built on the Net. And then I check out the comment threads of Get Real Post and wonder...

If there are so many of these yahoos who supposedly beg to differ to the ideas we put on the table to be subject to public scrutiny, the question to ask is: Where are the comments that aim to challenge these views?

Being surrounded by people who agree with me all the time is starting to get boring.

But then I recall the way Filipinos tend to apply a passive-aggressive approach to dealing with most in-your-face challenges and I realise, that this is all really not very surprising. It's one thing to grumble amongst one another. But what separates the men from the boys is:

(1) the ability to clearly articulate the specific points around which they beg to differ;

(2) the courage to express this view in territory outside of their comfort zone; and,

(3) the stability and presence of mind to remain consistent in the way they apply their thinking faculties in the course of the ensuing discussion.

Of course, these are Filipinos we are dealing with -- a people who time and again have demonstrated a consistent inability to think their way out of a paper bag. So I suppose it is a bit of a pointless exercise to expect much in the way of any sort of sporting challenge coming from rabble who spend their days in online love-ins amongst other like-minded folk baking their inbred ideas.

Tough luck! You guys know where to find Get Real Post. Simply click here.

GetRealPhilippines.com audience base: most highly-educated among Filipino collective blogs!

2011-05-26T10:38:00.009+10:00

After just three months online newly-equipped with its collective blog, Get Real Post, it is interesting how GetRealPhilippines.com now holds third place in world traffic rankings among the top six known (to me) Filipino collective blogs focused on politics and social issues. This is according to Alexa.com data.

Here are the rankings as of the 26th May 2011:

(1) DefinitelyFilipino.com (139,256)
(2) AntiPinoy.com (236,007)
(3) GetRealPhilippines.com (465,564)
(4) BlogWatch.tv (477,853)
(5) FilipinoFreethinkers.org (638,635)
(6) ProPinoy.net (662,685)

As the sun sets on some older past-use-by-date blogs, GetRealPhilippines.com shines through like the true Asian Tiger that the Philippines could have been!

* * *

More interesting even is the audience profile of each...

GetRealPhilippines.com
Based on internet averages, getrealphilippines.com is visited more frequently by males who are in the age range 35-44 and are graduate school educated.

AntiPinoy.com
Based on internet averages, antipinoy.com is visited more frequently by females who are in the age range 35-44, have no children, are college educated and browse this site from home.

ProPinoy.net
Compared with the overall internet population, this site's users are disproportionately female, and they are disproportionately low-income college graduates between the ages of 35 and 55 who browse from home

DefinitelyFilipino.com
Based on internet averages, definitelyfilipino.com is visited more frequently by females who are in the age range 45-54, have children, are college educated and browse this site from home.

FilipinoFreethinkers.org
Based on internet averages, filipinofreethinkers.org is visited more frequently by users who are in the age range 35-44, are college educated and browse this site from home.

BlogWatch.tv
Based on internet averages, blogwatch.tv is visited more frequently by females who are in the age range 35-44, have children, are college educated and browse this site from home.

Quite revealing indeed.

* * *

GetRealPhilippines.com, its blogging arm Get Real Post, and its broader network of Certified GetRealist Bloggers™ towers above all as the Philippines' most insightful, informative, and original trove of human knowledge and ideas. Don't miss out! Sign up to our main subscription channels:

Guaranteed: You'll be in brilliant company!

Bandwagon Commentators, Critical Commentators and the Philippine National 'debate'

2011-05-20T12:00:00.004+10:00

In the Philippine National "Debate", I've observed two general types of participants which I've classified under two labels -- (1) bandwagon commentators and (2) critical commentators. Perhaps it might be a worthwhile exercise to classify noted participants in the Philippine National "debate" into these two labeled buckets. Labeling after all is a natural inclination of the human mind, and perhaps when we use a cognitive device that the average person can relate to, we can get a better understanding of what separates the men from the boys in the world of "debate."

Bandwagon Commentators (BC's) are easily spotted. They make liberal use of the buzzwords and jargon of the day, quote lots of words ending in "ism", label people using words ending in "ist", and make repetitive use of slogans and taglines.

The discourse of true Critical Commentators (CC's), on the other hand, is marked by a complete aversion to jargon and textbook-ese. They are able to explain the most complex concepts using everyday words. In fact they are so comfortable with this rare skill that they exhibit unparalleled patience, consistency, and level-headedness when explaining their thoughts even to the uninformed (at least those who have a genuine interest in enlightening or educating themselves). Indeed, people like Stephen Hawking, Douglas Hofstadter and the late Carl Sagan who possessed vast intellects and whose breadth of knowledge and insight extends far beyond the grasp of at least 99 percent of humanity made names for themselves explaining stuff to ordinary people.

And that is what separates the men (the CC's) from the little boys (the BC's). There is smart (merely knowing) and there is really smart (knowing and being able to disseminate this knowledge). The biggest scholastic tragedy -- and waste of education expenditure -- is most evident in highly-educated people whose minds lie imprisoned by their own education.

Manuel Buencamino and other Noynoy Aquino apologists on the loose!

2011-05-04T11:17:00.006+10:00

Seems like self-described political expert Manuel Buencamino focused on the form rather than the substance of what "Senator" Juan Miguel Zubiri had to say about President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III's non-performance over the last nine months of his presidency. Quoting Zubiri, thus...

Last Easter, the man occupying the Senate seat won by Koko Pimentel, expressed disappointment with President Aquino.
“The President is a friend, but he has no clear vision for our country. He has no 2020 agenda. FVR had a Philippines 2000, while P-Noy has none, not even for 2015… I support his anti-corruption, but after that what? What else is new?” said “Senator” Juan Miguel Zubiri.

... Buencamino then proceeded to debunk the myth of former President Fidel Ramos's "Philippines 2000" dismissing it as a mere "slogan".

Then he goes off on a grinding itemisation of various "initiatives" that Noynoy is supposedly involved in as well as a debunking of some of Zubiri's "advice", including:

* * *

(1) Noynoy's "fight against corruption"

President Aquino’s anti-corruption campaign is not only about going after plunderers, election cheats, and human rights violators from the previous administration. It is also about eradicating the climate of impunity where vermin thrived and prospered. It is about bringing back a sense of shame, propriety, and delicadeza.

(2) Zubiri's "unsolicited advice on oil price increases"

going full blast on bio-fuels production in a country with very limited space to plant and an exploding population that needs to be fed is not very sensible. It would make more sense to revive the slogan made famous during martial law, “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, bisikleta ang kailangan.”

(3) Zubiri's "proposal to eliminate the VAT on oil"

Subsidies always sound good. However, the revenue gap created by the loss of 12 percent in oil VAT, a very substantial amount, must be covered. There is no going around it. The question then is should the government impose new taxes or introduce cuts in the budget or do a combination of both in order to “pay” for the 12 percent fuel subsidy?

* * *

All makes for a good old-fashioned Pinoy style case of expert grandstanding. But then synthesise all that and what have you got? One citation of a cliché inititative that every President and his dog sloganeered about during their campaign and two counter-arguments against Zubiri's "suggestions".

But as to the whole original point of "Senator" Zubiri's musings; that is,

The mystery of the postulated existence of Noynoy's vision for the Philippines

Seems like even Buencamino is left scratching his pointed head when it comes to that question.

Perhaps we should ask Mr Buencamino or perhaps everyone out there who continue to renew their bizarre membership in the Cult of Noynoy Apologism the same question again at some future date.

A chat with Ayn Rand fan and objectivism advocate Froilan Vincent

2011-04-24T02:56:00.005+10:00

I had a nice chat with Ayn Rand online fan Froilan Vincent on the blog post "An advice to a dimwit" [sic] which he authored on his Randroid site Vincenton Post. Unfortunately much of the record of this revealing chat had been deleted from public eyes by Mr Vincent. Forunately I discovered that simply clicking on the "Back" button on my browser brought up cached pages of the site with the original text still on the comment submission form of the site. I thought I'd share these gems for those who are up for a bit of a laugh.

Here is the comment I submitted that started it all:

By the way, check out my latest masterpiece: "The ultimate Easter reflection question: Why would the ‘Son of God’ die for us?"

Excerpt:
For that matter, are there absolutes, to begin with? To postulate absolutes even using the majesty of our known science and mathematics still makes said postulated absolute, itself, a mere notion framed by the very human constructs (albeit possessing far more rigour than our natural intuition) in our science and mathematics.

Read the full article here!

Oks ba? You don't know me that well. Yet. Ask around. You'll most likely find out who I am -- and how I invented trolling ten years ago. :p

One of my fans even dedicated a whole blogspot site to me. Check it out right here. And you know what the even bigger gag is? I've even been an Ayn Rand fan myself once -- that is until I realised that most of her followers were brain-dead wannabes like you. Kinda ruined it for me. I guess I have people like you to thank for that.

Ironic, isn't it? Then again, irony tends to fly over the heads of people such as yourself. :D

But then the above comment (which I did give a bit of effort to typing out, dang!) disappeared from the moderation queue. The text that follows (in italics) are all my words typed into Vincent Post's comment box and submitted as comments. They appeared for a while and were all eventually deleted.

* * *

Tsk tsk. Deleted my under moderation comment, did you? What's the matter, can't handle a humble ex-troll like me? As I said earlier. I invented trolling ten years ago. Indeed, you can check out my proud track record on PinoyExchange right here.

I always knew there was something about the old days I kinda missed when I suddenly found myself being regarded in the Pinoy blogosphere as a "respectable" blogger. And I gotta admit, dude, you bring out the good ol' days of happy-go-lucky trolling. Best part of it is that because you are a relative nobody in Da Pinoy blogosphere, it's just you and me here, kid. Perhaps you, me, and the handful of losers who come to read your drivel every now and then.

Then again, too bad you are into deleting comments that kinda don't jive with your stunted world view. You're missing half your life not engaging in a brilliant guy like me. Too bad. :D

Here's Vincent Post explaining his actions in his usual insightful form:

@ Dimwit benign0:

I deleted your comments. Now that’s absolute. They’re gone. That’s also my absolute right because my right is not limited by anything whatsoever- and this blogsite is my private property… Let’s see if you can send the thought-control and anti-free speech police to arrest me. Can you? Why? Because I never violated any of your crappy right! Do you understand that concept? You can howl all you can. You can even leap to your death and the result would be ABSOLUTE: dead or alive! ;-) [permalink]

No problemo. I really don't have any interest in having my comments retained here. After all, who's gonna read them? Oh yeah, just you, and the handful of losers who visit your site to read your drivel. But to me, that['s] all that matters. I really want you to get to know me a bit better. An ex-Randroid talking to a current Randroid. O di ba? You should write a blog about our little exchange someday. It'll be your best shot at a hit which your blog seems to be starved for. Imagine wannabe nobody Vincent Post being given the time of day by A-List Blogger benign0. That should get a bit of you flagging ego a bit of a boost.

Hey wait. since you deleted my pervious comment, I forgot to remind you of my most recent and, as usual, brilliant piece on GR Post.

Check it out here:

http://getrealphilippines.com/blog/2011/04/the-ultimate-easter-reflection-question-why-would-the-son-of-god-die-for-us/

Oh yeah, and I know now why my comment was put under moderation. It's because I included more than one hyperlink in the comment. I guess that simply means I will have to spread out the other stuff I feel like telling you across several comments. Here i will include this gem of a link:

http://benign0.blogspot.com/

It is a blogspot site put up by one of the ex-moderators of one of the forums I used to hang out in back in the good ol' days when I was a nasty little troll. Kinda flattering, I must admit. But then that kinda left the "bengin0" name beyond my reach as far as blogspot is concerned. Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

So maybe think twice about deleting my comments. Or at least save them in a Notepad file (you're a PC user, right? I'll bet you're even one of those losers who still use Internet Explorer) before you delete them. It'll be great material for your next article which I look forward to read.

Tsk tsk [after yet another comment deleted]. Is there such a thing as an overheated "delete" button? You're certainly in the mood to overwork that poor Wordpress functionality. I'll tell you what, it's a bit late already so I might give you and your "Delete" button a bit of a break. You disappoint me though. After all that pathetic effort getting everyone to come visit your site, a rockstar of Da Pinoy blogosphere comes visiting and the best you can do is delete his comments. Tsk tsk. Where's that good ol' Pinoy hospitality. Gen Y nga naman talaga. Talk about generation-wide attention deficit disorder.

* * *

A bit of fun for the night and a journey to a not-so-distant but definitely a nostalgic past for me. A fleeting opportunity to re-visit my roots.

A demonstration of the Filipino's Heritage of Smallness at work

2011-04-21T22:13:00.013+10:00

Quibbling on terminology. The hallmark of small minds. It's like how the Law and its letter attempts to articulate a society's ethical framework. In the process of doing that, it creates an entire industry of professionals who are schooled for years to know the Law to the letter. The question however is this:

Does knowing the letter of the Law necessarily make one a proponent of its spirit?

Consider then that the average Filipino politician -- yes, the very Filipinos that Filipinos love to hate -- is a lawyer. Indeed, the most hated politician in Philippine history, and the one most Filipinos blame for what the Philippines had become -- the late former President Ferdinand Marcos -- is himself a top graduate of the prestigious University of the Philippines Law School. He is, as such, a man who knows the Law far better than most Filipinos. Yet can it be said that Marcos takes to heart the spirit of this Law he knows so well?

Over at the AP Crowd (a Facebook group populated by people who see themselves as proponents of the "Anti-Pinoy" spirit), an article shared from the Get Real Post, Ilda's seminal "Do Filipinos know how to use their freedom of speech?", true to the form of most Get Real Philippines material makes waves -- to the tune of 277 comments as of this writing. The "debate" however, revolves around a quibbling over terminology.

Trouble is, to reach a conceptual understanding and appreciation for deeper meaning, one needs to transcend words. It is much the same way that the Law itself can be made as a tool for delivering justice -- or injustice -- by simply limiting a "debate" to an evaluaion of the Law's letter. That is in fact what a lawyer is trained to be nowadays -- someone whose cleverness is channeled towards finding creative means to subvert and pervert the letter of the Law to suit his or her clients' agendas; or in the case of lawyer-politicians his or her party's (or in most cases in the Philippines, personal) political objectives.

Not surprising then that in a society ruled by lawyers (people who make a living focusing on its letter, specifically) -- and not just lawyers but Filipino lawyers -- justice and other nice things that would normally constitute the whole point of the Law -- remain paralysed and dysfunctional. Indeed, people who cannot get past words and the literal are the ones that tend to have minds imprisoned by dogma and flawed systems of thinking.

So in a typical legal battle (or a battle that focus on letters rather than concepts and ideas), the whole point that would have been highlighted by bigger minds becomes lost in a morass of noise swirling around pathetic quibbles over terminology.

But then such is the case in a society that is populated by people who harbour small minds between their ears. They deserved to be ruled by lawyers and not by the Law and its true spirit (much the same way as religion rather than spirituality rules in most backward primitivist societies).

"In Japan there are very few lawyers and the codes are mostly unwritten, but they are binding, nonetheless."
- Greg Sheridan, Asian Values Western Dreams

And that difference is what sets apart truly great societies -- and truly great people -- from the merely average and, worse, the chronically mediocre.

Freedom of speech is a 'right': Says WHO exactly?

2011-04-21T10:08:00.005+10:00

A notion that needs to be challenged: that "freedom of speech" is a "right"? Where exactly did that notion come from? That's up there with the notion that everyone has the "right" to pursue "happiness". Is it now? Is everyone entitled to be "happy"? Both of those notions are enshrined in Western philosophy. But just because they are such does not make them absolutes in the natural scheme of things. Both of these are human constructs and it just so happens that we live in societies that have woven these notions into the very fabric of their thinking.

No doubt to be "free" and "happy" are nice things to have. But to see them as "rights" is an artificial notion ingrained in our heads by generations of ambient messages -- the victory of the "allies" in World War II, the Cold War, wars against "terror" and stuff like that. All noble ideals of course. But artificial constructs just the same. By saying these are absolutes, people frame their thinking using a very small subset of humanity's vast range of philosophies (in the process progressively imprisoning themsleves into ever convoluted dogmatic frameworks). Western philosophy just happens to be the philosophy we live by. But that does not necessarily mean it is the only one.

So let us all think carefully before we make any assertions about any "absolutes". Doing so is the height of intellectual hubris and the mark of wannabe "philosophers" who have swallowed other people's thinking right off the shelf hook line and sinker.

[This post is based on a comment made in the article "Do Filipinos know how to use their freedom of speech?" published on Get Real Post.]

It seemed like a good idea at the time

2011-04-11T20:51:00.004+10:00

Famous last words: "It seemed like a good idea at the time." How many times have we heard those words? We recall harbouring ideas and notions in our minds and expressing these in words that go on to sound ridiculous in hindsight. Tragic that for many of us, wisdom usually comes when it is most useless -- when it is too late.

Fueled by powerful emotions -- pride, self importance, misplaced senses of entitlement, feelings of invincibility, bloated estimations of self-worth -- we launch into tirades, fly into rages, surrender to sudden impulses, and go for broke. We then imagine that out of such a frenzy of "action" we will be greeted by a chorus of applause and accolades from an imagined throng of watching admirers.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Unfortunately the aftermath of such sweet surrenders reveals something else in most cases: reality. The reality of our smallness, our averageness, our inconsequentiality, and our replaceabilty relative to what we made ourselves out to be in surrendering to our hubris.

While it is true that an ability to reflect on events past is a virtue, I believe what sets apart the truly insightful is the ability to reflect upon future consequences of one's present actions. Perhaps some may be gifted with such an ability and enjoy the benefit of going through life guided by theory and first principles alone, while others are doomed to learn primarily from experience and be motivated by memories of past experiences that stung them. Unfortunately learning from experience is premised on surviving said experience from which one derives that hard lesson. Not too many people are that lucky.

How easy it is for people to lose touch with reality

2011-04-04T17:06:00.007+10:00

Do we really experience reality? Think about it. Where does our personal concept of reality really exist? We think that we are in touch with our surroundings through our senses. That is of course true -- up to a point. Without minds that have been honed by years of experience turning nerve and neural signals (generated by our thought processes and our five senses whenever these capture external stimuli; i.e., light, vibration, texture, etc.) into mental constructs, there would be no experience as we, well, experience it now. Indeed, our minds piece together mental models of the world based on how it interprets data, and we "experience" those models as proxies of the real world.

In actual fact, the real first-hand world is an alien one. The "real world" that lies just outside our senses is a chaotic jumble of electromagnetic radiation, physical oscillations, and chemical processes. Our eyes take in only a narrow band of the ambient radiation, the part of it we call "visible light"; our ears collect vibrations within the range of 20,000 Hz to 20 Hz, what we call the "audible range". And as far as touching and tasting goes, well, we are pretty much aware of what we can and cannot (or rather should and should not) touch and taste.

Our "world" as we experience it is no more than a construct of our minds. The world is out there, of course. But we experience it through our mind's simulations which are based on a very tiny subset of the total range of signals that blanket this world. Anyone who's experienced vivid dreams knows only too well how exceedingly easy it is for us to lose touch of what is real. Our mind can quite easily make us believe what it wants us to believe -- and indeed it does, both during and after our waking hours.

Scary, isn't it?

It is precisely this scariness that makes a whole genre of movies that includes such seminal hits as Total Recall, The Matrix, and Inception resonate across cultures. These films in their different brilliant styles remind us of how precariously tethered our minds are to "reality".

Perhaps it is because our brains are such finely-tuned instruments of self-delusion that we find keeping ourselves in touch with reality such a conscious effort. Often we spend an entire lifetime constructing a belief system around ourselves then progressively cocoon ourselves within its comfy confines. Perhaps we so pride ourselves in how carefully-crafted these belief systems are that our internal conversations get less and less anchored on external input and more and more looped into what these beliefs tell us from the inside.

Consider that for most of the history of modern humans, people deferred to beliefs as the fixed given and their own observations as the variable. If one's belief is that there are elves and fairies, then one is most likely inclined to "see" (or perceive) elves and fairies in their surroundings every now and then. Such people see "miracles" where there is only an explainable natural process and "answered prayers" where there is only a statistically probable (or at least possible) event.

The dawn of the scientific method which occurred relatively recently (after tens of thousands of years of the earlier) reversed all that. With the advent of science came the relegation of beliefs (now known as theories and hypotheses) to being the variables of the thinking equation and the results of observation and experimentation as the constants. For many of the most educated among us today, theories stand as sound for as long as the empirical evidence supports it -- a way of thinking that is largely alien to the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived.

Application of the scientific method need not be confined to laboratories or the halls of technical and scientific institutes. The Method can be applied even to one's personal life by routinely asking one's self:

Am I applying sound beliefs when regarding my world, my actions, and my relationships with other people?

Perhaps the day we more consciously start applying a bit of empiricism in the way we conduct our personal affairs is the day we become a truly enlightened and insightful people. Perhaps it is time that we test for soundness the beliefs that we live by.

The opportunities we miss as a result of a failure to imagine

2011-04-01T23:24:00.005+11:00

There are many artifacts, ideas, and beliefs in our lives that hang on to us with emotional hooks. Often these hooks remain securely fastened to our psyche even as the sense of their continued presence in our lives begins to wane. Recall how you would unhook a clothes hanger from your closet rack. The act of unhooking something requires one to first work against gravity to clear the hook from the object you want to move it away from. Some of us fail or wait an entire lifetime before that small, but perhaps uncomfortable step is taken. Others are lucky enough (or have the presence of mind) to recognise every opportunity to unhook themselves from old baggage as soon as these present themselves.

Travel light and shed unnecessary baggage along the way.

Every piece of dead weight baggage shed represents an embarkation on a new phase of our personal journeys with a renewed vigor fueled by a new-found lightness of being. Even outlook and perspective are inclined to change in a snap as soon as we are able to view the world undistracted by the effort of carrying around stuff we had recently discarded. We then wonder why we had not let go sooner and moved on faster. Things always seem clearer in retrospect.

The most tangible benefit comes in the form of a more robust appreciation of your true value in a way that is suddenly independent of this baggage you once thought was an essential component of your value proposition to society. To be able to find value in one's self and add value to others (or in a more general sense) without the overhead of unnecessary complication levied by all sorts of stuff is liberating to say the least.

It's as easy as focusing more on imagining the future.

What happens next after the initial heave to clear a hook from an object it is hanging from?

Perhaps we instead fixate upon the effort of that initial heave we need to take. That fixation is often caused by a failure to imagine the bigger world we are free to explore once unhooked.

Get Real Post: The official blog of Get Real Philippines is online!

2011-03-23T06:32:00.007+11:00

Get Real Post is now online! This is the forum where issues will be discussed from well-considered perspectives. Check it out right here, or logon with the following URL:

GetRealPhilippines.com/Blog

The site is a Wordpress installation within the GetRealPhilippines.com domain and currently makes use of the Magazine Basic theme with a bit of customisation applied to the CSS code.

I've since re-named this blog (the one you are reading now) "benign0's blog" and I will continue to write here about stuff that comes to my mind every now and then. Happy reading and let's welcome Get Real Post to the GRP Network!

Filipinos cannot progress if they cannot follow even simple guidelines

2011-03-20T17:06:00.007+11:00

A noted blog commentator once made an assertion that the Philippines will never be a great nation unless Filipinos learn to live by the principle of the "rule of law". Indeed, some people even insist that none of the calls by certain sectors of Philippine society for a system change like a shift from a Presidential to a Parliamentary system or even constitutional amendments will work to uplift the status of the nation because Filipinos simply cannot follow the "rule of law."

It is quite certain that the success of any nation depends on the character of the head of state and the character of the people in general. A strong leader will put the interest of the nation first before anything else. A strong leader supported by strong institutions can work towards achieving social and economic stability for the people.

However, a weak leader in a country like the Philippines, which has weak institutions will tend to succumb to the world-renowned Filipino "padrino" system -- a system that trumps any other system in place. Worse, such a leader will mask his weakness or understanding of the law by acting like he is above the law.

A weak leader, whether he is leading a country or a small community tends to let praises or expressions of adoration from the public get to his head. Because he is easily impressed by such accolades, he also tends to become arrogant and will see criticism of him as a mere non-constructive annoyance. Such a leader will not work towards unity and harmony in Philippine society. Unfortunately, weak systems tend to harbor weak leaders.

What is with Filipinos and following the rule of law?

There is very little evidence that Filipinos are capable of living by the "rule of law". The society is quite extraordinary in the sense that simple rules and regulations whether on the road or in the work place are for the most part ignored. This is because each individual has this baseless sense of being more important than everybody else. It is why you see people cutting you off on highway lanes on the road or pushing their way in lines ahead of the rest in a queue. In other words, Filipinos in general tend to put their own interest first before other people.

As a blogger, I quite often come across commentators who cannot even follow simple commenting guidelines. There are some participants in the blogosphere who constantly violate the guidelines by consistently writing obscenities and foul language on forums just to give the impression that they are above the guidelines. The funny thing is, being moderated does not even stop them from misbehaving. They even cry foul for being moderated instead of conforming to the guidelines.

This brings us to another world-renowned Filipino mentality -- the "victim" mentality. Filipinos are good at playing the "victim card" because they are very sensitive and emotional people. They play the victim card in front of the public to get as much attention as possible. Filipinos always try to get around following any rules and regulations or even simple guidelines by appealing to emotion.

Filipino victim mentality was quite evident in the case of a group of nurses in the US who reportedly filed a discrimination complaint when their employer called their attention for speaking too much in their native Tagalog at work. Victim mentality was also quite evident in the way the Philippine government tried to intervene and stop the execution of three drug mules that were sentenced to death in China for violating their anti-drug rule. Likewise, victim mentality is definitely evident in the way the incumbent President, Noynoy Aquino (PNoy) cries foul whenever he is criticized for decisions that were obviously not thought through very well.

It is quite interesting to note that some Filipinos would rather act like idiots than follow the rules. They always want to find an easy way out of a situation. They want to make uncomplicated things complicated. This brings us to another world-renowned Filipino trait: "lack of discipline."

Filipinos in general are incapable of any form of discipline because they focus more on form rather than substance. In short, they want to stand out. They lack the discipline to engage in discussions in a civilized way and lack the discipline to not turn a public forum into a circus. This is why issues do not get resolved. This is a consistent observation -- from every Senate inquiry being broadcast to the Filipino public down to the most benign discussions in the blogosphere, Filipinos love honking their horns.

Worse, Filipinos in general feel a strong sense of entitlement to relax or "chill-out" even when there is still so much to do to move the country forward. Instead of discussing solutions seriously and in detail during their spare time, Filipinos would rather spend it fooling around -- never mind that societies from great nations like China, Japan and South Korea have historically shown that being more serious and devoting more of their time to solving problems yields better results in the long term.

From the top guys and gals sitting behind desks at the Presidential office down to the tricycle driver down the road, everyone just wants to have "fun" in the Philippines first before tackling the problems of the land in a more serious manner. You can be forgiven for thinking that one hit wonder Wang Chung probably wrote the song "Everybody have fun tonight" for Filipinos. It can absolutely boggle the mind to wonder why Filipinos cannot limit switching to party mode when they are at an actual party.

As discussed in my previous article, Filipinos are proud of being a happy-go-lucky society and make it a point to show the rest of the world that they are coping with smiling faces despite the dire circumstances they face. This mentality shows that Filipinos are satisfied with mediocrity and find striving for excellence too daunting. A few remaining Filipinos who want to engage in a more serious discussions are even labeled "kill-joy" or "librarians." Aside from their penchant for bullying when others don't engage in "pakikisama," Filipinos indeed, have a tendency to discriminate against more sober ways of tackling solutions.

Unfortunately, a 90 year old study by psychologist Dr Leslie Martin and his colleagues in California suggested that "too much of a sense that everything will be fine can be dangerous because it can lead one to be careless about things that are important to long life." Likewise, the study also showed that those who are always optimistic take more gambles with their health. They were more likely to drink, smoke and eat badly, which is a typical characteristic of a Filipino. While prudent and persistent individuals are more cautious with their health and overall wellbeing – characteristics that are less likely to be found in Filipinos.

Filipinos have so much to learn from the Japanese. Despite the devastation that the people of Japan experienced due to the magnitude 8.9 earthquake that hit country and the killer tsunami that followed immediately after, people around the world admired the stoicism and orderly reaction of the Japanese. People in most societies would have found themselves wailing in misery and chaos after such destruction.

Maia Szalavitz in an article she wrote for TIME magazine aptly described how it works for the Japanese – they follow the belief that "others are at least on par with the self, if not more important." Here's an excerpt:

"In restaurants, you never pour your own sake, you have to notice whose glass is empty and you serve them. It's these little rituals [that have prepared them for this crisis] so that even if you have one bowl of rice, you share it with a stranger.

The wonderful thing about the Japanese is that they are presenting an example of the pro-social power of the group. The group as a whole is saying explicitly or implicitly, this is what we do: no looting, no horn honking even if you're in a 12 mile traffic jam, no complaining. [CNN's] Anderson Cooper said he'd never seen such calm in the face of such adversity."

Not that Filipinos need copy what the Japanese do to a tee, but the most interesting thing to note about societies like Japan is that nobody has the desire to grandstand. Individuals do not want to show that they are more important than everybody else. This is in stark contrast to people in societies like the Philippines where people in general want to be the "star." And this is the reason why some Filipinos think that they are above the "law" or above even just simple "guidelines."

Discipline should be inculcated at an early age. If people are not taught how to follow rules and regulations when they are still young, they will be shocked to realize once they enter the "adult" world that they will have a hard time coping with life if they keep deviating from the rules that put order in society. Which is what is happening to most Filipinos now.

A scenario where Filipinos can aspire to world domination

2011-03-19T18:44:00.007+11:00

Our minds are wired by millions of years of evolution to react to vermin with very primal -- often reflexive -- responses. Not only do we recoil in horror at the sight of decomposing biological matter our other senses are exquisitely attuned to detecting evidence of vermin infestation -- the smell of rotting flesh elicits the gagging sensation, bitter tastes repel us, touching something slimy or squishy disgusts us. All of the chemical agents that oppress our senses are the products of decomposition caused by vermin (of both the microbial and multi-celled varieties).

Vermin outnumber humans in the millions to one. They infest every nook and cranny of every form and aspect of human habitation. Some of them are essential to our survival -- they aid digestion and decompose our toxic waste products into forms that can be recycled by natural processes. Others pose immediate threats to us. They carry disease and transmit them to us. Many feed on and, in so doing, degrade our food. Still others ruin what we build simply by making their homes within them. As such we are not only repelled or offended by evidence of their work, we also directly find their existence disturbing if not objectionable.

Whether their contribution to human interests is a plus or minus, vermin have one thing in common. They are alien to us. In short, nature has ingrained in our psyche a deep instinct to find discomfort in both direct and indirect evidence of alien habitation within our personal spaces.

In this way, I contextualise what was initially something vaguely disturbing about the following snippet coming from Roberto de Ocampo's recent article on the Inquirer.net, "The Chosen People"...

Great masses of Filipinos cover the entire park of Central Hong Kong and the famed Spanish steps in Rome every Sunday.

Perhaps, Filipinos are indeed the "Chosen People" as de Ocampo asserts. Our ability to multiply at rates far beyond replacement levels, makes us collectively immune to practically anything that nature might throw at us.

Our fragility as a species has supposedly come to light in the aftermath of a raft of recent disasters -- the earthquakes and floods that devastated Christchurch in New Zealand, large swaths of coastal and inland towns and cities in Queensland, Australia, and most recently Japan. Less tangible but even more far reaching are the impacts to entire ways of life by financial collapses, and the catastrophes (both immediate and drawn-out) caused by our ever-growing demand for energy-dense fuels like petroleum and radioactive minerals. But this "fragility" is in the context of the large-scale structures of civilisation advanced societies had built -- complex supply chains, vast economic interdependencies, and intricate works of engineering are all designed under the premise of acceptable risk. The combination of factors that contributed to the failure of the cooling systems in the nuclear facilities currently in peril in Japan was deemed a highly unlikely scenario at a time these systems were designed. Financial systems operate under the dubious premise of limitless "growth" deemed "likely" by "economists".

Filipinos on the other hand lack any such systems and any such structures at the scale found in advanced societies like Japan. Tens of thousands of Filipino lives are needlessly lost and millions wasted in impoverishment every year because of a lack of these advanced structures of civilisation. Yet, as de Ocampo observes, the prospect of Filipinos engulfing the planet with our sheer numbers is not such a farfetched scenario. From a purely Darwinian perspective, we can be considered to be a successful strain of humans in the same way that a relatively mindless mass of microbes can bring an elephant to its grave.

Observes de Ocampo further...

The 2011 fertility rate estimate for Spain is 1.47, Italy 1.39, UK 1.91, France 1.96 and Germany 1.41, to name a select few. The average fertility rate of all Western Europe is about 1.5. In short, these nations are either on are perilously close to what population experts call an irreversible demographic decline. To put it more starkly, for example, by 2020 (or just nine years from now) more than half of all births in a country like, say, the Netherlands (1.66 fertility rate) will be of non-European Dutch origin. Furthermore, with the birth rate dropping below replacement, the population of such countries ages and the problems facing an aging population are numerous and startling enough to deserve a separate treatise.

Humans will persist. Perhaps not in the form Western-set standards of civilised living currently describe. But we as a species will probably be around for a long time, maybe even in a post-technological world. Such will be a world where Filipinos will have a legitimate claim to world domination.

Nuclear energy: too hot to handle for "macho" Filipinos

2011-03-17T11:19:00.009+11:00

In the aftermath of the 11th March super-earthquake that devastated Japan and caused a health and environmental crisis after damaged nuclear reactors started releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere, the Philippines remains mired in a too-little-too-late soul searching along two key areas: (1) its capability to respond in the event of a similar-sized disaster hitting its main population centres, and (2) the future of its nuclear energy program.

When one considers how Filipinos failed to learn anything from a wealth of lessons coming from past natural and man-made disasters that have hit the Philippines over the last 50 years it becomes a safe bet that Filipinos will not follow through on any (if any) outcome coming from the first soul-searching exercise. As for the second, there seems to be no evidence of any serious effort to find alternative sources of energy beyond importing more oil from a bunch of unstable Arab kingdoms. With any further will to even explore development of nuclear energy in the Philippines all but crushed, Filipinos are most likely to defer back to their renowned cultural comfort zones bahala na ("come what may") and pwede na yan ("that'll do").

And yet, despite Filipinos' strong tradition of complacency, low-thinking-applied reaction is the order of the day amongst a substance-starved population. The Inquirer editor calls it a "history of overreaction"...

In the same way that the first Persian Gulf war in 1991 led anxious Filipinos, thousands of miles away from any possible danger, to empty grocery shelves, anxious Filipinos have been passing improbable rumors about radiation from Japan reaching Philippine shores. Only this time, the misinformation multiplied at the speed of SMS.

Some text messages contained suggested remedies to use in case of radiation, such as the popular Betadine. Some purported to quote news organizations, such as the BBC. Some even pinpointed the time the first wave of radiation would arrive: 4 p.m.

Of course, this is not surprising for a supposedly 21st Century society living in a world of unprecedented access to information that has a renowned track record of deferring their sensibilities to superstition, religious dogma, the uninformed edicts of pastors and clerics, grandstanding politicians, street mobs, and "social media" chatter.

Columnist Randy David in a particularly brilliant burst of insight (just incrementally beyond his usual brilliant form) hits the nail on the head as far as pinpointing the stark difference in demeanor between substance-deficited societies like the Philippines and all-around wealthy ones like Japan:

Japan, a big user and producer of nuclear plants, became a leader in the industry—an amazing achievement for a nation that had been traumatized by the destructive application of nuclear power in wartime.

In short, a nation that had been history's first and so far only targetted victim of a premeditated nuclear bombardment simply went on to develop a vast nuclear energy generation capability regardless.

That puts a bit of context behind the laughable sight of Filipinos running around squealing and shrieking over rumours of radioactive apocalypse. Japan's ability to look to the future with unmatched lucidity even as it faces the challenge of coming to terms with the immense tragedy of today is a bright beacon of courage and grace shining upon all of humanity. Certainly it is a grace that puts Filipinos' utter lack of grace in perspective. But I prefer to defer yet again to Mr David's words to highlight this point...

Risk-taking is a feature of modern societies. Traditional societies, in contrast, tend to be too intimidated by life’s many dangers—i.e., to losses due to external forces—as to be inclined to forgo many opportunities. In our case, this conservative attitude seemed to be changing, albeit slowly. But, after Fukushima, one doubts very much if Filipinos would be willing to even listen to former Rep. Mark Cojuangco passionately argue the case for the activation of the mothballed [Bataan Nuclear Power Plant].

Filipinos, in all ironies, are renowned for their noisy and colourful bravado. Everything from the Philippine National "Debate" down to idle alcohol-fuelled discussion in beer houses is dominated by lots of banter about imagined conquests, self-described virility, and loud use of big words -- perhaps to mask an inner flaccidity, profound insecurity over a vast wasteland where results should have been, and a penchant for shrieky national panic attacks -- all evidence of a hopelessly virulent adolescent mind that defies all national efforts to outgrow it.

Contrast this with Japan where clean lines, sober stoicism, and quiet achievement define the national character.

Population and disaster preparedness: still part of the poverty equation

2011-03-16T14:58:00.005+11:00

Recall in the whole debate on over-population in the Philippines and how we've established the logical link between population increase and poverty through our simple, robust, and scalable definition of poverty: "a habitual entering into commitments that one is inherently unable to honour". The spectre of the scale of death and destruction that could slug the Philippines in the event of a strong earthquake occuring near or within Metro Manila demonstrates how even more impoverished we are than conventional measures indicated.

Whereas we always think of ourselves as an intractably poor nation because of our lack of ability to educate and employ our own people, we are now are starting to come to terms with our lack of ability to secure our people's safety against disaster as well.

We can only sit back and watch helplessly as we multiply like cockroaches and occupy every nook and cranny offered by our decrepit capital city -- even parts of it that represent the proverbial sand lot that the proverbial fool builds his house upon. Considering this is a biblical parable, the implications of this foolhardiness are potentially biblical in proportion. Catastrophic disasters like earthquakes and cyclones notwithstanding, Filipinos clinging to and scratching out an existence along Manila's flood plains, riverbanks, breakwaters, inside its cemeteries, under its bridges, along the walls of its esteros (storm water canals), beside its train tracks, and within sprawling tinderbox shantytowns that carpet vast tracts of land within Manila are by themselves disasters in the making; perhaps call our lot the slow-release disaster.

The ballooning in numbers of a people who are inherently unable to support their own numbers is itself a slowly-unfolding disaster.

Thus, this sudden focus on earthquake preparedness we are seeing being bandied around in Media and in the halls of Congress is no more than a quaint attempt to assure one another that Filipinos do possess some semblance of token foresight at best. But a people who famously allowed a shipping company that figured in the worst peace time maritime disaster in world history to continue operating for two subsequent decades and go on to be party to several more "accidents" that killed thousands more over those subsequent 20 years can't be taken seriously. We may as well start saying our prayers for those thirty-odd thousand poor sods who are likely to die in the event of an earthquake measuring even just seven on the Richter scale hitting Manila (the one that hit Japan measured 8.9).

The two words "prepared Filipino" form an oxymoron. There simply is no such thing. There may be talk, but the substance just isn't there.

Ironically this reality about Filipinos could form a good foundation for the arguments of those who believe that we should not make any attempt to reduce population growth. Other societies -- where life is regarded as precious enough -- leave no stone unturned in their efforts to prepare for and mitigate disaster. Filipinos, in contrast, need to reproduce in vast numbers to compensate for their lack of capacity and will to prepare for and mitigate whatever tragedy the future might bring upon -- whether in the form of a single fell swoop or in the form of a slow drawn-out degeneration of quality of life and dignity.

Doom and gloom - the best of times for religious enterprise!

2011-03-15T10:39:00.004+11:00

Now is a great time to start a business! As evident in the raft of information "products" being churned out by that well of reliable factoids, Philippine Mainstream Media, doom and gloom sells like lechon manok in an ignorant medieval society such as the Philippines. The earthquakes that recently struck Japan and New Zealand, the prospect of a "big one" striking the Philippines itself, the spectre of radioactive clouds descending upon most of East Asia, civil war in the Arab world displacing thousands of henceforth unemployable Filipino Overseas Foreign Workers (OFWs), "super moons" unleashing super storms and even more natural disasters over the face of the planet, even alien species threatening to overrun the archipelago -- the possibilities and opportunities are infinite!

The Philippine Government itself is caught up in a bit of its own soul-searching as it -- for that matter, we -- come to terms with the stark reality that Manila is staring with glazed eyes at a monumental disaster waiting to happen. It's like the feeling a schoolboy gets having come to school with homework undone. You just know you're gonna get it bad.

Sen. Loren Legarda said that the Senate should look into the state of earthquake preparedness of Metro Manila, and the actions taken to reduce the earthquake risk.

Such a review, she said, was critical in view of the 2004 Metro Manila Earthquake Impact Reduction Study (MMIERS) which said that a big inland 7.2-magnitude earthquake could happen anytime in the metropolis as an offshoot of the movement of the West Valley Fault.

[...]

The study provided a glimpse of the devastation wrought by such a powerful quake: 169,000 homes destroyed, and 340,000 other homes damaged; collapse of seven bridges, and the resulting deaths of 34,000 people, and injuries to 114,000 others, she said.

The ensuing fires would result in an additional 18,000 fatalities, while power and telephone lines would be interrupted, Legarda added.

Desperation is creeping up upon Pinoy sensibilities. Hollow-headed text messages carrying wrong information being forwarded around by the equally hollow-headed morons who receive them are symptoms of a society starved for something to latch on to.

So yes folks, where there is a need -- a desperate one, no less -- that can be satisfied with very primal emotional hooks, there abounds lucrative business opportunities. And what better way to take full advantage of ignorance, fear, and rampant misinformation than to set up a religious enterprise.

Religion as a business makes perfect sense. Profits are non-taxable, and revenues are almost entirely realised in cold cash. There are no government regulatory bodies that scrutinise the impact on public wellbeing of "services" delivered by religious institutions. The industry, in short, is entirely unregulated. As such, religious enterprises pretty much have free rein to "develop" all sorts of mind-altering "products" -- entire philosophical and dogmatic frameworks can be cooked up and disseminated via a network of profitable information channels: books, magazines, television, and radio; and marketed through mind-imprisoning rituals, seminars, and "assemblies" -- through schools even!

Best of all, the Philippine market for religious products is vast. 100 million ill-educated, misinformed, misguided and superstitious folk is a customer base for a religious enterprise that simply cannot be ignored. And with the current market leader -- the multinational corporation to end all multinational corporations, the mighty Roman Catholic Church -- currently suffering a credibility and relevance crisis, the industry is ripe for the entry of fresh competition!

Japan after the earthquake: no need for our prayers

2011-03-13T18:23:00.007+11:00

I keep reading about people encouraging one another to "pray" for Japan in this time of great tragedy after a massive earthquake and accompanying tsunami devastated its coastline and killed hundreds of her people. I'm not quite sure Japan needs our prayers. Japan is regarded as the country in the highest state of constant preparedness for earthquakes. As such, the disastrous earthquake that struck Japan is a tragedy, but one that is not tragic in the sense of it being a preventable loss of life.

To me, the stoicism and quiet grace with which the Japanese greeted the unimaginable destruction and loss of life, mobilised its forces to assess and respond, and reached out to the global community to receive assistance speaks volumes of the magnificence of Japanese society. Japan's prayers are different from our prayers. Being a predominantly Shinto and Buddhist society, Japanese prayers generally express a profound respect for nature and an acute mindfulness for one's surroundings. Emphasis is on a life led in harmony with nature and recognition that one is but a part in a vast ecosystem.

In contrast, Catholics see nature as subject to man, and man subject to the "mysterious" whims of their wrathful and all-controlling God. As such, a Catholic's prayers put emphasis on their subjection to the will of God (to explain adversity) and their being showered with his graces (to explain good times). For Catholic Filipinos, prayer is surrender, while for the Japanese, prayer is expressed as reverence for a system of which one is a part. A Catholic's prayer is about deliverance from the physical world, while that of the average Japanese is about embrace of the physical world.

Thus, the Japanese have already said their prayers for those who lost their lives and were severely impact by the earthquake. But unlike ours that are uttered after the fact of a tragedy, the Japanese people pray before the fact. The vast and carefully thought-out measures they had put in place to anticipate and mitigate the risk of a disaster such as the one we are seeing today, is Japan's prayer for its dead and suffering today. Such a sort of prayer, in my opinion, is far superior to the Catholic's prayer. Being done before the fact, it frees minds to focus on acting with clarity of purpose when adversity strikes, rather than imprisoning minds with questions about and surrender to a god's "purpose" as the case would be for after the fact prayers.

While the loss of life in Japan in the aftermath of this year's monster earthquake is staggering, it cannot be said to be one that resulted from any form of reckless neglect. Because the Japanese had done all it can in life to respect the living it has little need for prayers -- only a focus on action and learning and the tangible support coming from nations that are, themselves, possessing of characters consistent with an ethic underpinned by respect for human dignity.

Perhaps Filipinos should instead reserve their "prayers" for their compatriots who remain victims of a long tradition of a lack of inclination to anticipate, prepare for, and mitigate against what the physical world can often unexpectedly spring upon the living.

Google Philippines' Top 20 most influential Filipino women

2011-03-10T16:30:00.007+11:00

I recently got a load of Google's list of most "influential" Filipinas (Filipino women) for 2010. The list is utterly dominated by performers along with a handful of notable exceptions: Senator Miriam Santiago (no. 10), Doris Dumlao (journalist, no. 12), Monique Lhullier (designer, no. 17), and Korina Sanchez (journalist, no. 19). These 20 ladies supposedly "grabbed the greatest online mindshare in 2010". So presumably, they reflect the substance of the Filipino collective mind.

Here they are:

1. Shalani Soledad (TV Host & City Councilor of Valenzuela)
2. Kris Aquino (TV-host actress)
3. Ruffa Gutierrez (Former beauty queen and TV-host actress)
4. Maria Venus Raj (Beauty Queen and TV-Host)
5. Charice Pempengco (International Singer)
6. Angel Locsin (Actress)
7. Sarah Geronimo (Singer-Actress)
8. Regine Velasquez (Singer-Actress)
9. Heart Evangelista (Actress)
10. Miriam Defensor-Santiago (Senator)
11. Lea Salonga (Award-winning international Filipino singer)
12. Doris Dumlao (Philippine Daily Inquirer journalist)
13. Kristine Hermosa (Actress)
14. Toni Gonzaga (Singer-Actress)
15. Sharon Cuneta (Singer-Actress)
16. Mariel Rodriguez (TV-host actress)
17. Monique Lhuillier (Designer)
18. Bea Alonzo (Actress)
19. Korina Sanchez (Broadcast Journalist)
20. Nora Aunor (Dramatic Actress)

Quite revealing, this list. Topping it are an ex-presidential squeeze who now co-hosts top Philippine brain opiate Willing Willie (a television "variety show", to say the most), a presidential sister known mainly for her ditziness and bad taste in men, and an aging sexpot who grandstands about her indignation over "scandalous" behaviour that apparently offends her "conservative" nature.

What exactly have these performers done? What groundbreaking insights have they added to the collective intellect and cultural capital of Philippine society that enhances the value of our colective equity as a people? What, therefore, is the nature of their "influence" over the Filipino mind?

That well of truth Wikipedia defines "mind share" as "the development of consumer awareness or popularity" and is "one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion". So these ladies apparently represent some kind of marketing triumph either (1) for the marketers of the products they endorse, or (2) the agents and managers who earn commissions from their lucrative gigs.

Considering that "achievement", they can be considered to have done well for themselves, as they've done an excellent job of making a bundle of money not only for themselves, but for the middlemen and downstream industries and entities that bring out their buckets whenever these celebrities drum up some cash. And, yes, this cash is the tangible outcome of this influence they wield -- which highlights the tragedy of what it means to be a mere consumer. To be a mere consumer is to be on the wrong side of society's equation.

This tragedy is particularly poignant in the Philippines as evident in those who constitute its most influential personalities -- people who for the most part are not known for output that can even be remotely considered to be globally competitive. Indeed, it is their being down-to-earth and "reachable" (the Tagalog translation of the latter word being a Filipino euphemism for mediocrity) that made most of these personalities local stars. Fitting for a people renowned for constituting a nation of star-struck ignoramuses, as one noted modern-day Filipino philosopher observed...

You are a nation of star-struck ignoramuses. You are easily awed by your movie stars who are usually nothing but uneducated, aquiline-nosed and light-skinned ******** picked up from some gutter somewhere. I have seen what these artistas illusionadas can get away with. They just flash their capped-tooth smiles and policemen let them get away with traffic violations; they bat their false eyelashes and customs officers impose no duty on their suspicious balikbayan boxes.

Worst of all, with the Filipino movie industry taking a nosedive, hordes of actors and show personalities went into politics. It is, as they say, the next best "racket"-there is more money to be made in the politicking business than in show business! (And what is this I hear that in the coming elections, more are jumping into the arena? Mag-hara-kiri na kayo!) How can you expect these comedians and actors, who only know how to take directions from their directors, to direct your nation? For them,politics will just be an "act". No big surprise here, for they are mere actors with no original scripts to speak, no original visions to share. So what can you expect but a government that is a comedy of errors. Serves you and your star- struck nation right!

[...]

For those artistas who honestly believe that they can make a positive difference in the Filipino masses' life, they must first study law, business and public administration, and immerse themselves in the life and passion of Mother Teresa. Politics is not an art for dilettante artistas to dabble in. It is called "Political Science," hello?!

The above was written more than ten years ago -- way back in 2000. Its timelessness is the sort of property that earns it the distinction of being a true piece of real insight.

Where none exists

2011-03-10T09:53:00.004+11:00

The human brain is a wondrous instrument. It starts out as a blank data processing device that is wired to five data collection channels -- our senses. From the minute we are born, our senses kick into operation, collecting information about our environment and feeding it to the brain.

One can't really imagine what it is like receiving such a deluge of data with no starting point to work with.

Most likely the first image to be captured by the eyes of a newborn baby would be its mother's face. But then how does its brain make sense of a face when it does not have any prior concept of an eye, a nose, a mouth, much less the entire package these elements comprise -- said face?

We all know how this story pans out eventually. By the toddler years, most humans will have developed from this blank slate state into an exquisitely-tuned instrument of facial recognition -- able to distinguish individual people by even the subtlest of differences in facial features within milliseconds of a glance. Of course being something that we do within mere milliseconds, it is a skill we utterly take for granted -- until we realise that even the most powerful machines built by the finest engineers (motivated by anti-terrorist money entire governments are willing to spend) still can't do it as well as the average three-year-old.

Like the rest of our plethora of impulses that collectively make up our mind -- the thingy that makes us who we are -- our ability to recognise faces is not an engineered ability. Nothing conciously programmed our brains with any rules or algorithms to govern how we tell one another apart just by looking at them. It is an ability painstakingly built from the ground up by our brain by piecing together every bit of data streamed into it by one sense, relating and associating these to other bits of data streamed from other senses, and assigning symbollic meaning to each. Each symbol goes on to form ever more complex hierarchies and inter-relations of symbols -- pupils plus irises to form eyes, eyes forming a pair, then associated with a nose, a mouth, and all being packaged together to form a concept of a face, and so on and so forth. As the complexity and compoundness of symbols reach a certain critical mass, we then start to assign swaths of meaning across -- and criss-crossing -- symbols. "Mother" to a particular face, "kuya" to another.

As our minds develop more and more complex and compound symbols and assign meanings to them and meanings upon those meanings, we start to lose sight of the lower level elements that compose these increasing abstractions.

It's kind of like how we consider a ballbearing to be spherical even if microscopic irregularities at its surface cause its radius to vary along said surface.

So while some of us may be busy enjoying an episode of Wowowee on TV, our dogs may sit beside us baffled as to why their masters consistently derive pleasure out of staring at a screen made up of a matrix of randomly blinking coloured dots. Our ability to perceive the gyrating girlettes on screen is made possible by our mind's ability to turn data encoded in those blinking coloured dots and raise them to a higher level of abstraction that is simply beyond the reach of the mind of a dog.

[Douglas R. Hofstadter in his book I Am a Strange Loop explains in detail.]

The brain is basically a massively complex device for simplifying data by systematically building higher level abstractions.

We see the pair of eyes, nose, and mouth, and right away we think "face!". We perceive the elements, and our minds connect the dots (where it perceives the existence of said connections) and turn them into a higher-level concept.

It also does the same with events. As events stream into our consciousness, the mind draws upon its episodic memory to create higher-level stories or narratives that serve as proxies to help us explain stuff to ourselves. Stories and narratives are the higher-level abstractions of events in the same way that compound symbols and complex concepts are higher-level abstractions of data bits and simple symbols. As we mature as a sentient organism we progressively dwell more on ever higher levels of meaning as our brain continues its lifelong effort of synthesizing and simplifying. It is our way of making sense of the things around us and the events that we experience in a way that spares us of having to individually track the vast number of things going on around us.

Unfortunately our minds sometimes form the wrong connections or tell the wrong story from the data it perceives.

It comes up with a cause-and-effect relationship where none exists.

It's kind of like how, just shortly after the death of a loved one, every perturbation in our eyesight, every wistful breeze we feel, or a whiff of something that reminds us of a childhood ambience is made out to be some kind of supernatural "presence" -- "Nagparamdam ang yumaon" ("the deceased is making its presence felt") as the Old Farts would say in the vernacular.

The brilliant thinker Nassim Taleb calls this the narrative fallacy. The venerable George Lucas for his part prefers a far cooler term: the Jedi Mind Trick.

Whatever we choose to call it, organised religion, cults, con artists, advertisers, and politicians have so brilliantly -- and profitably -- exploited this flaw in human thinking architecture since time immemorial. Tragically it is the weak- and small-minded that are most vulnerable to its effects.

[This article was originally published by the author on 16 April 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com.]

Simplifying the unknown

2011-03-09T20:29:00.003+11:00

While people seek comfort in religion for assurance that they simply wouldn't blink out when they finally croak, religion for its part has dismally failed to deliver on its end of the deal and provide a convincing concept of eternal existence that the modern human mind could at least explore in the way that it does best.

Instead of a coherent framework to simplify the unknown, we get an appeal to the mysteriousness of the unknown. Not satisfying to say the least. This appeal quite simply no longer cuts it in a modern society (which last I heard, Filipinos aspire to becoming).

So let's simplify the unknown, shall we?

Sounds oxymoronic, doesn't it? But consider that most misunderstood "unknown" called infinity. A commentator recently admonished me:

benigno, even the greatest REAL minds in all the history of mankind never pretend to speak, in authoritarian manner, in infinite terms. to define infinity is to limit it, which is absurd and contradictory.

He was of course referring to a brilliantly simple mathematical principle that underpins my challenge to the monopoly that organised religion enjoys over governance applied to how people regard what happens after they die. The concept is so simple that I can state it in one phrase (a complete sentence is not even needed):

The certainty of even the most unlikely given infinity

With the above phrase, you could actually go up to the Pope and a-la Crocodile Dundee, tell him flat out: "Dude, that's not a god, this is a god".

How certain is, say, a one-in-a-million guy like me, given infinity? Quite simply, very certain; in fact infinitely certain. I am not a unique individual across space (if space is infinite), and/or I am not a unique individual across time (if time is infinite). Because everything with a non-zero probability of happening will happen given infinity. That means there will be an infinite number of instances of moi all over space for all eternity.

How's that for a humbling concept to regard?

Consider that even the god of the Roman Catholic Church Himself consistently fails to curtail the renowned misplaced kayabangan (arrogance) and self-importance of the typical Filipino. If we then regard a robust ability to evoke humility in a thinking people as a measure of godliness, then hands-down, my god wins.

We all want a simple god -- not one that plunged (and continues to plunge) humanity into innumerable wars, and immeasurable atrocities, all the while accumulating untold volumes of painfully convoluted written reasoning to prop up a pained semblance of His coherence in our minds. In mediocre thinking is propagated our continued beholdenness to the absurd. And it is in all ironies the absurd that the most militant mediocrity is nourished.

So consider the epiphany of the venerable Jim Paredes where the term "militant mediocrity" arises:

This “militant mediocrity” is easily threatened by superior ideas and often rejects them outright. Because it is highly invested in being average, it mocks anything that wants to raise the bar. Don’t we often dismiss as pilosopo, a snob, or an elitist, anyone who questions or challenges us with new concepts and ideas and new ways of thinking?

Fortunately for those who see the elegant simplicity in the concepts of the infinite, there is no need to renounce your Catholic sensibilities. It's quite simple:

Hell is empty, because God's mercy is "infinite".

If we are to believe in God's infinite mercy, we can conclude that behind every sin, is an infinite range of possible avenues for clemency. So fear not for your souls.

[This article was originally published by the author on 21 April 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com.]

Security, empowerment, and access

2011-03-09T09:50:00.005+11:00

Oftentimes it is the most mundane of things going on around us -- things we take for granted as business-as-usual that, when regarded from the point of view from a lateral thinker so effectively highlight some the most disturbing aspects of our society.

Picture these scenes, for example:

- The ubiquity of heavily armed uniformed private security personnel detailed at every other corner shop, bank branch, and entrance to residential enclaves.

- Stonewalling automaton-like sales clerks and bank tellers trained in a narrowly-defined transactional scope; police officers fearful of applying the law to what may turn out to be a high-ranking politician or government official.

- Homeowners -- from the wealthiest down to even lower-middle-class families -- cloistered in gated communities that require specially issued passes for outsiders to enter.

These are but a small subset of a vast landscape of what are mere symptoms of the underlying deeply-entrenched rot in Philippine society.

Fear not though, because there is always an underlying simplicity in most things that leave average-minded folk scratching their heads. Like every big mis-understood monster, we just need to up our thinking faculties and acquire the ability to deeply understand what motivates said monster.

If we look closely at the above examples, they each illustrate issues around three key enablers to developing a cohesive and productive society:

- Security
- Empowerment
- Access

A society where people have come to depend on privately-employed armed forces to assure their security, have been rendered powerless by draconian controls and bureaucratic complexity, and are faced with institutionalised curtailment of access is indeed a sick one.

Quite simply:

- Without security there can be no openness.

- Without empowerment, there can be no efficiency.

- Without access there can be no simplicity.

So guess what:

A society where everything is closed, inefficient, and complicated is fertile breeding ground for corruption.

We can see now how corruption and productivity are so closely inter-related. Corruption hobbles productivity and lack of productivity breeds corruption. Corruption therefore cannot simply be considered to be some kind of bogeyman to launch “wars against corruption” against. It is a feature inherent to Philippine society. Its roots are intricately interwoven into the very fabric of our society. Efforts to eliminate corruption have always lacked scale and structure. Strong-arm low-thinking-applied approaches to rooting out corruption have failed miserably so many times, precisely because they were done without a clear understanding of the complex relationship it has with its host society. And because of this, procedures are designed and agencies are organised to work in an insular, stand alone manner which fails to achieve the scale that only a government with finely coordinated and interlinked agencies can achieve.

Indeed, because Filipinos are not exactly renowned for our systemic thinking (the arch-enemy of institutional corruption) it is hardly surprising that our systems suck, as the venerable Conrado de Quiros observes:

Pacquiao’s monumental triumphs, in fact, merely reaffirm an old-age truth we ourselves have glimpsed in the form of the question: Why is it that Filipinos do exceedingly well when they go abroad? Or more to the point, because it holds the key to its answer: Why is it that Filipinos obey the rules, act like model citizens, and work their asses off when they’re abroad?

These are questions we’ve always answered with: Because of the system.

There’s nothing innately wrong with the Filipino. There is nothing in his genes that prevents him from accomplishing big things. There is nothing in his physical or mental endowments that obstructs his capacity to do great things.

But there is everything wrong with his system. It’s his system that robs him of his discipline, his direction, his drive. It’s his system that prevents him from envisioning grand things. It’s his system that stops him from accomplishing great things.

Elsewhere in the world, the system rewards the upright and punishes the wicked. Elsewhere in the world, the system praises the worthy and damns the rotten. Elsewhere in the world, the system applies the law to everyone, jailing bank robbers and Bernie Madoffs alike, jailing common criminals and uncommon criminals alike. Elsewhere in the world, the system allows merit to thrive and demerit to perish. Elsewhere in the world, the system pushes the promising to excel and the corrupt to rot away. Elsewhere in the world, the system provides the foundation or the support or the ground for talent to blossom into genius.

That is how Filipinos do great things when they’re abroad. The system allows them to.

While at first the above may come across as another thing that triumphalists may use to prove that Filipinos are not responsible for their chronic inability to progress, I see it more as highlighting our biggest failure as a people: we consistently fail at creating and implementing a system for ourselves that enables us to be successful as a Nation.

Furthermore, a people who see themselves as helpless and disenfranchised simply cannot be moved in the right direction. Such hopelessness is an outcome of limitations to their scope of thinking imposed by:

- irrelevant and impractical traditions and belief systems;

- a chosen language that dismally fails to connect their minds to the broader and deeper collective knowledge amassed by humanity over the last several millenia, and;

- a cultural aversion to creating new options, critically evaluating existing options, and begging to differ to authority (in the truly insightful way that those who truly beg to differ do).

While the first and third of the above three are quite widely accepted as real issues to be reckoned with, it seems there is still significant debate around language as an enabler for world class thinking and world class achievement (the latter word being the substance behind any real hope for a better Philippines).

Perhaps the following diagram would help us grasp the smallness of the prison cell within which our chosen "national language" imprisons our minds and utterly disempowers us (click to enlarge):

A lack of real power is what turns a people into a chaotic mob of passive-agressive anarchists who, despite possessing The Vote, still do not see their duly-elected representatives in Government as truly representing their interests. Tragically, we are sold on the concept that this "freedom" we supposedly enjoy as a democratic people is what supposedly "empowers" us.

Guess again. As I wrote a while back:

We use ["freedom"] as an excuse to elect fools to office only to flick them off the pedestal we helped them climb onto with even more foolish displays of street parliamentarianism. We even use this "freedom" to run a publishing industry that capitalises on the stupidity of the masses; allowing it to scrimp on journalistic talent and integrity.

Indeed;

The irony that escapes the Filipino mind is that true freedom can only be earned after a thorough and consistent application of rigour in EVERY aspect of how we conduct ourselves.

Now that I mention the above, I incidentally now rememebr too why we also consistently fail at delivering on the world-stage of international-grade arts. In the snippet below (which I quote from my book, by the way) I not only articulate this but ultimately tie even this art angle back to our own hollow-headed regard for democracy:

We are completely baffled by the idea that the stratospheric value of a Mercedes, a Rolex, or a La Coste shirt comes primarily from the excellent engineering, design, or quality of these products; that pedestrian crossings and lane markers painted on roads are not simply to make a road “look modern”; that true artistic beauty is a product of depth in structure and meaning and not just of chaotic expression; that democracy is a discipline and not merely a freedom to enjoy wantonly.

That puts a dark pall over the prospects of a people not exactly known for exercising rigour, consistency, and follow-through in any collective undertaking. After all, bahala na ("come what may") and pwede na yan ("that'll do") remain the national mantras of choice.

Like every other subset of the all-encompassing framework of thought that I apply to every bit of work I publish here and everywhere else, the elegant simplicity of this three-pronged approach to regarding our prospects for prosperity lies in its robust scalability. You can see it relevant both at the macro and at the mirco levels of society and even in our own personal day-to-day interactions with our environment and immediate social circle.

Security.

Empowerment.

Access.

It's simple, really™ -- though not for the small-minded.

[This article was originally published by the author on 12 May 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com.]

False anger: to the Filipina on International Women's Day

2011-03-08T19:30:00.005+11:00

[Reviving this gem in commemoration of International Women's Day.]

Rape cases often boil down to a her-word-against-his and a his-word-against-hers battle. As if that weren't enough, in the Philippines, the pervading primitivism brought about by our cultural baggage routinely adds a thick wrapper of moronic drama around rape, reducing the facts-and-logic component of most rape cases to an insignificant nucleus within a thick morass of "public scrutiny".

As such, the only real contribution of the public scrutiny and "analysis" that sensational rape cases attract (all brokered at a profit of course by the Philippine Media) is premature judgment. The kind of trial-by-media and premature judgment we have become renowned for in such instances is a manifestation of a two-fold psychosis that our society suffers from as outcomes of (1) our inability to get over our four-century subjugation by colonial powers and (2) our narrow dogmatic regard for human sexuality.

The first plays upon that all-too-familiar vicitim mentality that continues to afflict us to this day. It is succinctly encapsulated by Ishmael Ahab in the following excerpt from his recent article:

Soldiers of the American Government, since they stepped on our country, raped and abused many Filipinas. Accounts of rape during the Philippine-American war is not lacking and up until now the American Government did not issue any official statement seeking forgiveness for their brutality during that war.

I dunno, but I recall how one of the Philippine blogosphere's more astute commentators once quipped how "we cannot keep what we cannot defend"; a principle that can be extended to include the toothless way by which we keep raw and open the wounds of our hapless people's "victimisation" in the various battles fought by foreign armies on Philippine soil. As often is the case, it begs the usual question:

Where are the results?

Consider this question in light of how the armies and agents of the Jewish Nation continue to hunt down Nazi war criminals all over the world -- often rooting them out from undocumented blissful obscurity in some banana republic and dragging them kicking and screaming to court. It is the kind of conviction only seen in a people who have a clear definition of what they stand for to sustainably fuel their efforts. Ningas-cogon anyone? It is in this light that we learn to appreciate the utter flaccidity of The Filipino "Laban" Rhetoric that infests our modern literature. Though while we continue to go around stomping our feet about this and that instance of "injustice" against our hapless lot, the reality is we as a people simply lack the cojones to exercise our prerogatives.

All Filipinos have to show for after all the "L" shaped finger waving from the lofty moral highground we imagine ourselves to stand upon is judgement over the way the Big Bad American, the Mayabang (arrogant) Kastila, and the Siba (greedy) Filipino-Chinese "victimise" Juan de la Cruz.

And so we wave our clenched fists in the air (in the tired old cliche'd way we tend to do) and scream "It is time for us to stand for the Filipina. Let us make rape history" (as if rape ever will be). But let us look underneath the slogan and examine what underpins it. When we invoke the kind of poetic license we learn at WanBol Emementary School and regard the oxymoron that is "The Filipina" we see Maria Clara. But when we take stock of current popular perceptions and sentiments including the sort of "tourists" the Philippines tends to attract, we see something else.

As Seinfeld is wont to say, what's up with that?

What's up with all this brings us to the second aspect of our collective psychosis. We continue to use an old caricature to guide our ideas of what the quintessential Filipino Woman is. In reality, the Filipina is now shaped by an agglomeration of various modern-day influences. Central to this is the hypocrisy of a double standard that favours the Filipino male when it comes to infidelity and premarital intimacy.

And so the irony continues to escape the famously vacuous "national debate" -- how we as a people have actually failed to protect our own women from the very demons we wave our fists at in flaccid anger. Consider that we as a nation now rely on the armies of female workers we send overseas to fund our appetite for cheap trinkets and dessicated packaged food imported from China and Indonesia. We routinely see mothers separated for years from their children and call them "heroes". Our moronic dogmatism routinely deprives the most helpless of women from real and modern methods of safe contraception.

Our sick fascination with rape (when it should be seen for what it is -- a crime for which justice brought about by due process is dispensed swiftly) and the accompanying "disgust" we relish even as we soak up every little morsel of hearsay surrounding each case, says a lot about us as a people.

[This article was originally published by the author on 20 May 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com.]

A shared sense of belonging

2011-03-07T23:57:00.004+11:00

At the coffee shop where I routinely get my morning fix, customers mill around the counter in a way that often makes it difficult to distinguish those who are (a) in the process of ordering and paying, or (2) waiting for a concluded order to be served. So it is a normal and routine courtesy to politely ask: "Where do I get in line?". The remarkable thing here is that even where a queue is not readily apparent, one actually exists. Each person just makes a mental note of who came first -- and the collective outcome simply comes together in a natural way.

Even where there is a physically obvious queue, such as in a supermarket with multiple checkout counters, the kind of decency that is all but alien to the Filipino mind routinely manifests itself here. Once while waiting in line for my turn to pay for a trolley full of groceries, a cashier showed up and opened a previously closed checkout counter adjacent to the one I was lined up in. The person behind me politely told me he was jumping onto that counter and invited me to go ahead of him seeing that I was, in fact and quite obviously, ahead of him in the queue we were presently in. I thanked him and we both went for the newly-opened counter. In the broader scheme of things, both of us saved a bit of time -- in a way that was fair to both of us.

In the above examples, a simple criterion applies to becoming a functional member of this collective -- each one only need remember his place in the queue.

There are many other examples of systems where general order and/or harmony emerges from a shared sense of basic courtesy amongst their participants. The above two examples illustrate systems that are simple enough so much so that it is easy to see the causal link between the outcome observed and the behaviour of individual elements within the system. In those examples, the courteous behaviour individually applied by the system participants clearly resulted in a harmonious or orderly outcome overall.

More complex systems are the same in principle -- individual behaviours that follow a set of shared, albeit more complex set of rules, result in a collective outcome. The only difference is that the causal links become less readily observed as the comlexity of a system increases. The term emergent property or outcome is usually used to describe such phenomena that "mysteriously" arise from complex systems. The mind, for example, is an emergent property of the human brain -- a phenomenon that is an outcome of extremely complex interactions amongst the billions of individual elements (e.g. individual neurons) within the brain. Somehow, a thinking mind happens and is kept functional as a result of those billions of massively-networked neurons firing electrical impulses at one another every single second throughout the entire life of a person.

Yet neurons by themselves are no more complex than any other cell in the body. Examining a single neuron will not in any way give us any insight on how a brain produces a mind. In the same way, the behavioural drivers of an individual person are pretty much useless when trying to predict the overall behaviour of the society in which he lives.

Following this line of reasoning, the foundation of civic culture in the Philippines can be seen as residing in the way ordinary individual Filipino citizens regard one another. If there is a general respect and trust for one another, as the thinking goes, it indicates that most individuals see themselves as having a general collective personal stake in society at large, and the overall collective in theory goes on to mature into a harmonious and prosperous society.

But what do we see in Filipino society?

Systems whose effectiveness rely on basic trust and decency often fail.

Democracy is one such system that in theory relies on the wisdom of the collective. In practice, though, it merely relies on the wisdom of the majority. There's a big difference between the two. When we say "collective" we usually mean a collection of elements that can be regarded as a unit. On the other hand, "majority" merely refers to a section or subset of such a collection of elements.

In my simple coffee shop example, the order observed amongst the waiting customers is possible because they behave as a collective. Each customer's individual sense of place in the queue, makes the system work. Without this shared sense of individual place, arguments or jostling may take place, and some customers may simply leave.

To generalise this observation, if the set of individual rules that makes collective behaviour possible is not shared among all elements of a system, the behaviour of the system becomes less predictable, less consistent, less rational, or at worst, utterly chaotic. Instability in such systems happen even if the majority of customers upheld the rules as long as even a minority exists that doesn't.

Think now of a system where the majority do not behave in accordance with rules that by design are pre-requisite to an outcome expected of said system.

What is the expected outcome of "democracy" as a system of governance applied to Philippine society?

Think of this question in light of the obvious reality that the vast majority of Filipinos do not see their role in a democratic system in the same way that you and I do. It puts into proper perspective this "bewilderment" at the behaviour of, say, a House of Representatives whose members are elected by popular vote doing things perceived to be "not in the interests of their constituents". Why be so "shocked" and "disappointed" by such an outcome? Maybe it is because we expect a body constituted by members that are products of The Vote to do the right thing year after year after year. This expectation is underpinned by a doozy of an assumption -- that the Rule --or the choices -- of the Majority is right.

Unfortunately the majority IS NOT necessarily the same as the collective. Specifically, the collective interests are NOT necessarily the interests perceived by the majority.

Our ability as a people to behave as a collective will not come from political solutions. It will not come from new systems of governance, nor will it come from any new "leaders" or even "heroes" stepping up to the plate. Our ability to behave as a collective -- as a UNIT -- will come only from deep within the fabric of our character as a people and from a shared sense of what it means to be an individual that belongs.

We have a long LONG way to go, for even in the simple task of defining what The Filipino stands for, we merely shrink back, shake our heads, and tell one another, bahala na.

[This article was originally published by the author on 04 June 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com.]

Crock for the flock: The official communication strategy of the Roman Catholic Church

2011-03-07T12:59:00.003+11:00

How I choose to exercise my spirituality is a personal matter. However, what can be readily observed from the ideas I make public in what I write and what I say to family in friends makes evident my lack of respect for the Roman Catholic Church. I do not differentiate between individual officers within this institution. If a person sees himself or herself as an officer of this institution (a priest, a brother, a nun, or whatever title that implies position within its hierarchy), it pre-supposes his or her adherence to its dogma. So to the argument "not all priests think like that" whenever another instance of moronic ideas propagated by the Church makes headline news, I say I don't think so.

Priests and nuns took a vow of obedience when they became priests and nuns. And with regard to the ideas that are espoused by the Church's top brass to whom these priests are duty-bound to obey, Catholic dogma is quite categorical on many things that we are led to believe to be "debatable". Quite simply, for example, fornicators (and even those who merely think of engaging in it) commit "mortal sin". That does not leave much room for the ordinary person in the "debate", doesn't it? Catholic dogma is peppered with similar absolutes -- tenets that are non-negotiable. As such, any semblance of the Church engaging in "discussion" or "consultation" with secular entities comes across to me as mere insults to the intelligence of its "flock".

Crock for the flock.

This is the official communication strategy of the Roman Catholic Church.

There is no point in debating with people who merely pretend to debate. Why bother differentiating Father Juan from Father Jose? At the end of the day (with apologies to those who hate that cliché), they are all officers of the Church and, being so, are subject to its membership rules -- all of which are documented in black and white.

We love to describe ourselves as a people who remain vigilant lest the forces of tyranny take us over once again. And yet our society and culture revolve around an institution that is fundamentally unmoved by free-inquiry -- the Roman Catholic Church. Even at the height of his rule, former President Ferdinand Marcos -- the Filipino's favourite bad guy -- listened to the needs of Filipinos or, at the very least, was affected by their sentiment. Former President Gloria Arroyo too, that other favourite Pinoy bad guy, ultimately was subject to the "people's will" both in stepping down as President in a legitimate election and ascending to a House seat by similar virtue of The Vote.

Compare this to the the Catholic Church. Here is an institution that bypasses all civil forums for debate and consultation and unashamedly uses its 2000-year-old fear capital to hold the minds of its constituents hostage. At best it is not too different from the typical modus operandi of our garden-variety dictators and at worst it makes these dictators look like Mother Theresa.

Indeed, the Church's power is derived from a perception that it holds sole authority over the nature of what one should believe in order to avoid eternal damnation. The Church has, as a matter of fact, shown an historic inclination to kill people who harbour and disseminate ideas that threaten this perception. Perhaps it has since evolved in its approach to protecting the basis of its awesome power. But the intent is still there.

I've noticed how immense personal and political bandwidth had already been wasted keeping the Church in the loop with regard to "debate" on reproductive health in the Philippines. The initiative of the Philippine government to extend an invitation to the Church to participate in this debate is a courtesy that the Church apparently fails to appreciate. Perhaps it is time that we simply cut them out of the conversation. When one schizophrenic party manages to derail the conversation of an entire group for so long, one begins to wonder about the sanity of the other members of said group.

English opens doors

2011-03-06T19:13:00.004+11:00

We'd like to believe that we deserve a society that treats people fairly regardless of how well they speak and write English and regardless of whether they speak it with a regional accent or not. We think, if we continue stomping our feet enough in a loud appeal to nationalist sentiment, that we could one day see a society where people with a fourth-grade level of English language proficiency are as well-regarded as those of us who are privy to the kind of thinking and knowledge that only the English language (as well as the languages of cultures with extensive track records of achievement) can efficiently convey.

Unfortunately what we think we deserve is not usually what we actually get.

Some people here may not have noticed it yet, but differences in degree of command over the English language across the population is one of the key polarising forces in Filipino society -- whether we like it or not. That is the grim reality whether it be in the mad scramble for plum positions in Government and the corporate world or a competition of ideas bourne out of those rare bursts of thinking outside the square (more specifically, thinking outside of the square of Pinoy-grade thinking).

As I did write in my book:

Acquisition of knowledge – the fuel for intellectual advancement – is an unnecessarily challenging issue in Philippine Society. The few volumes of material containing useful information in, say Tagalog, being turned out by the heroics of a few purists – and translators – constitute a trickle compared to the torrent of knowledge that is churned out by the advanced world everyday. The Philippine Elite, armed with their private school or foreign university educations – and superior command of English – readily soak this all up. The masses, on the other hand, struggle to grasp the same ideas through severely limited communication faculties. The insult of an inability to acquire ideas articulated in English is added to the injury of their lack of access to quality education.

Thus, the obvious Truth stares us in the face:

- English opens doors.

- Excellent English gets you through those doors first.

Indeed.

It gets you the great jobs.

Dish out a good dose of the ol' "Arrneo" accent and watch the smiles that follow in the faces of recruiters. Demonstrate consistent grammar, spelling, and sentence construction, and you find favour among managers who constantly fret over wasted time proofreading the reports and emails of the more vastly numerous products of the Philippines' diploma mills.

It gets you the chicks.

Don't believe all those Tagalog movies where Sharon Cuneta the kolehiyala falls for Robin Padilla the kanto boy. Those movies make a lot of money by playing on the sad frustrations and fantasies of the vast majority of Filipino males.

It gets you an audience.

An audience that matters, that is. Because, honestly folks, how much can one actually expect to learn from pandering to a crowd that finds comfort in re-assuring one another that being "down-to-earth" (read: mediocre) in English is "o.k."? There's a false sense of safety in the immense comforting numbers of Filipinos who come together in a gigantic love-in on the basis of a shared sense of exclusion from that tiny but elite world where world-class ideas are exchanged -- and profitably exploited -- in high-fallutin' glory. They are the masses and therefore the audience that matters, some say. Suuure. And yet we tremble at the might they wield come election time. Why do we "tremble"? Because we have come to know the palpable stupidity of the popular vote. What then do we learn by pandering to them? Leave that effort to the politicians -- a profession where even morons can succeed.

It so happens that the VAST majority of Filipinos are unable to cobble together an English paragraph without sporadically reverting to Tagalog words or simply turning the text into an incoherent spaghetti-like mishmash of subject-verb disagreements, inconsistent multiple clauses, and appalling application of idiomatic expressions (in the context of those, minor spelling oversights can be forgiven). Tragic when one considers how so many otherwise insightful ideas are not done justice by the people who wish to convey them, all because we prefer to find comfort in the warm fuzzy mediocrity of the vast majority.

The good news is that although I highlight that the tiny elite who enjoy an excellent command of English are overwhelmingly products of elite private schools, there are exceptional exceptions. You can see this in the few who have recognised what it takes to succeed in a society ravaged by a particularly debilitating strain of colonial mentality, and the broader reality of a world utterly dominated by a lingua franca that Filipinos once upon a time had a legitimate claim to mastery over in the region.

The bottom line is that English proficiency can be acquired regardless of the circumstances of one's upbringing. One only needs to stare what is real in the face and recognise what it takes to succeed.

The alternative will be a pathetic resignation to a lifetime of demanding that those who think as a matter of habit dumb down the language that they use.

[This article was originally published by the author on 09 June 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com.]

Winds of protectionism

2011-03-06T17:36:00.003+11:00

[I wrote this article in June of 2009 as the world reeled from the aftershocks of the 2007 to 2008 global financial meltdown. It remains relevant today as we evaluate development paths we need to take as a nation in a world that is undergoing fundamental change in economic order. It is relevant because Filipinos continue to foolishly look to foreign capital and import-driven consumption as a source of its economic salvation.]

Oh the wonders of centrally-controlled economies! China has upped the ante in the on-going global battle against the financial crisis by requiring projects and construction work financed by its $600 billion stimulus fund to buy local materials, unless the required goods cannot be sourced locally. This, of course, has been a cause for worry and even outrage in countries with economies dependent on the Chinese market, with U.S., Australian, and European diplomats issuing appeals and challenges to the rulings. Since the 1st of June [2009], government projects are already required to seek approval before closing any purchase orders for foreign goods.

Considering these protests and invocations of the spirit of "free trade" amongst China's major trading partners, it is interesting to note that the U.S. itself has issued its own "Buy American" provisions in relation to its own stimulus spending while in Australia, the New South Wales state government now provides attractive discounts for local firms bidding for government contracts.

Interesting times have a funny habit of bringing little inconsistencies in the philosophical and ideological fabric of some of the most well-pitched belief systems. In Australia, a big factory closed shop resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs. This was done by its owner -- a major garments firm -- as part of a move to outsource its manufacturing operations overseas. This led to a media frenzy that stirred up populist sentiment against the company. The response of a representative from the firm was quite simple:

Australians no longer find value in paying a premium for Australian-made goods.

To put the above statement in its proper context, it is important to note that the Australian consumer market is a bit different from that of the Philippines. Australian-made goods are generally of better quality but cost more than products imported from, say, China. Add to this the fact that nowadays, the label "Made in Australia" has become a rare sight on durable and semi-durable goods like plastic products, electronics, and clothing.

Yet Australia is a relatively self-sufficient economy. It grows more than enough food for its population and has a surplus of minerals and fuel deposits, not to mention the technological know-how to exploit these resources.

Australia can, given enough motivation and wherewithal to sacrifice a bit of its standard of living, opt-out from the global economy to a significant degree if it really wanted to.

China, though aware of how dependent its economy is on global demand for its cheap trinkets, for its part seems to be daring enough to dabble in protectionist policies even at the risk of retaliation from its trading partners. It also possesses the smarts, resources, and technology to overcome many challenges associated with being deprived of some of its foreign trade links. In one demonstration of its potential capacity for technological self-sufficiency, Beijing had excluded foreign suppliers of wind turbines -- even those with factories in China -- from bidding in its stimulus-funded power projects.

For Australians, it may be about a concious effort to consume less, specifically forego non-essential things people are led to believe come cheap -- for starters that Made-in-China Wall-E figurine that comes free with a Happy Meal, that Made-in-China blouse that costs one-fourth of a locally made one but also lasts one fourth of the time, those Made-in-China plastic sporks that you use once then throw away. The production of each one of these trinkets depletes the planet's resources unnecessarily and given the ridiculous volumes at which they are produced, well, you know where all this is surely headed.

For the Chinese it may be more about recognising its own domestic market for goods and services, certainly not a quick and dirty way of growing an economy at the 9% clip it's grown accustomed to, but potentially more sustainable and secure nonetheless given the high savings rate of the average Chinese household.

Protectionism. That taboo word of the last two decades is suddenly back in style. Stylish and a real option for those societies that possess an inherent capability to be self-sufficient in the same way that a person who knows how to farm, hunt, and make his own stuff need not rely on a supermarket and a job to live.

Now take the Philippines. It relies on imported food to feed its people and imported capital to sustain whatever industries that remain muddling along in its stagnant economy. It even applies a foreign idea to govern itself. Furthermore it relies on the altruism of the United States, Japan, and other rich countries to provide markets for its quaint highly-commoditised export products as well as employment opportunities for an immense surplus of people it is utterly incapable of employing domestically.

Even in prosperous times of robust global trade volumes, the Philippines was a consistent laggard -- ten to twenty years behind in development in a region of high-achievers. We exported warm bodies instead of keeping them happy and healthy on-shore and smartening them up to produce valuable stuff domestically. We also have one of the lowest savings rates in the region.

So we can imagine what troubles await us as entire economies close their doors to non-essential trade. We don't possess the kind of economic security to prioritise our specific interests simply because we have allowed ourselves to become imprisoned by our dependence on foreign stuff and foreign sources of income.

Indeed, consider then that what the crisis really highlights that is relevant to all is the need to get back to basics:

- Self-sufficiency -- being able to produce domestically what is consumed locally in order to;

- Reduce unhealthy and un-secure dependency on global trade and reliance on unnecessary shipping of goods.

- Simplification of the concept of economic value tying it squarely back to production and tangible assets all sustainably created through;

- Domestic capital creation -- an ability to rely on one's own inherent cleverness to create physical, intellectual, cultural, and (ultimately) financial capital indigenously.

The Philippine economy needs to get back to basics, to stop being a dumping ground for cheap Chinese trinkets, and to re-learn the basic arts of feeding and employing itself.

========

Step back and think of what really underpins our sorry addiction to "globalisation": the rich world's demand for getting things better, faster, and cheaper. An incomplete model of economics wielded by "expert" "economists" convinced several generations that it was economically viable to meet such a bratty demand for stuff. We are finding out now that this model is incomplete because it excluded environmental costs from its equations. Under more holistic economic models now being developed as the reality of environmental degradation becomes more palpable, shipping container loads of useless knickknacks halfway around the world begins to progressively make less sense.

The world economy undoubtedly will recover. But it is possible that the rich world's appetite for excess may not, choosing instead to adopt a more pragmatic economic order that takes the environment into account.

Is the Philippines prepared to compete in such a world, where there is less demand for the kind of useless manufactured goods Third World countries export?

[This article was originally published by the author on 19 June 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com.]

Bottled water: suckering an entire generation

2011-03-04T23:45:00.004+11:00

Imagine getting your power supply from big 220-volt cylindrical batteries that are charged at power generating plants and then delivered to you every week by truck to be hooked up to your home's wiring. You then load the spent battery from the previous week onto the truck which then hauls it back to the nearest power plant to be re-charged.

Doesn't this sound like a ridiculous way of being supplied electrical power?

Next time you buy a bottle of drinking water, think of how we've been so completely suckered into a dependency on this "product". It is a product that commands prices that are anywhere from a ten- to 100-fold premium over a more readily-accessible alternative -- tap water. Yet the industry is now worth billions.

As a wise man once said:

You can start a lucrative business with a bullshit product. All you need is a few million suckers to sell it to.

Indeed, selling bottled water has proven to be profitable, more so because manufacturers of bottled water do not have to bear the cost of storage and environmentally-sound disposal of the empty plastic bottles. Furthermore the bottles, like most plastic products, are petroleum-based. Let's also not forget to mention the fuel burned by delivery trucks moving the "product" about.

Bottled water is the biggest scam of the last several decades. How long is it going to take for the sensibilities of humanity to catch on?

Maybe to get a sense of humanity's track record of coming to its senses, consider that other billion-dollar industry -- tobacco. Smoking began to be banned in public buildings and then in enclosed areas only in the last two decades of the 20th Century - thirty years after its grave risks to peoples' health were discovered. Nevertheless, it is quite remarkable how cigarette smoking has gone from being the über-cool prop it used to be -- a la James Dean and his Lucky Strikes -- to the stigmatised disgusting habit it is seen to be today.

Why not a similar fate for this modern-day mass insanity? Just like the sight of a full ashtray today elicits revulsion once considered bizarre half a century ago, perhaps we will one day walk into a museum and get a few laughs viewing an exhibit dedicated to that old turn-of-the-century relic of humanity's victimisation-by-clever-marketing -- the Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottles used for selling drinking water to an entire generation of suckers.

There is hope:

THE Southern Highlands village of Bundanoon is poised to become the first town in Australia, and quite possibly the world, to ban commercially bottled water.

A town meeting tonight - bearing the almost irresistible slogan "Bundy on tap" - will ask for a formal show of hands on the proposed ban.

All Bundy's shops have supported a ban, agreeing to lose over-the-counter income in order to combat the hefty carbon footprint associated with bottling water and trucking it around the state.

"It's also a moral thing, in that it has just been such a wonderful marketing job by the beverage industry, selling people something they can have for free," said Huw Kingston, who owns a combined cafe and bike shop in the town.

Beverage companies truthfully maintain that bottled water is a healthier alternative to fizzy soft drinks. But the plastic bottles are made from crude oil and most are thrown away rather than being refilled.

See the full article here.

[This article was originally published by the author on the 8th of July 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com.]

The bullshit of "Earth Hour"

2011-03-04T21:06:00.005+11:00

Why subject yourself to an hour of unsustainable inconvenience (and maybe have to miss a favourite TV show while you are at it) when leading a life that quietly reduces your "carbon footprint" on an on-going basis without all the grandstanding involved in half-arsed spectacles like "Earth Hour" (to be observed 26 March of this year, 2011) is simple, easy, and sensible.

Here are a few things to consider as an individual:

Lose that monster clever marketers call a "sport utility vehicle".

Desk warriors who buy SUV's are victims of clever marketing. Using the latest in marketing techniques, the average urban schmoe is so completely persuaded by Big Business to cough up an extra $10,000 for equipment (such as an entire extra drive train) that will probably never be used over the life of the vehicle. And in case you think that a weekend spent every now and then in one of those "4WD Safaris" outside of city fringes justifies the obnoxious lump of metal on your driveway, think again about this "Earth Hour" you so recently participated in and wax poetic about and then that full tank of gasoline you burnt on the "trail" and consider the irony of it.

Think twice about buying "Made in China".

Most of today's garments and knick knacks are shipped thousands of miles from China and used all of two weeks on the average after which they end up in a landfill. Because they are so cheaply-produced, we;

- use more of them;

- keep them for shorter periods, and;

- acquire them for progressively lamer reasons.

Next time you are in a mall and see a spoiled brat get a Happy Meal stuffed in front of her face and a Disney-licensed imported-from-China toy made of petroleum-based plastic presented lovingly to the kid to temporarily stem a tantrum, go up to her parent and ask if she participated in "Earth Hour".

Besides, considering the on-going financial "crisis", what's the point of all these "stimulation package" handouts if they get spent on Chinese products?

Buy in bulk.

The biggest scourge of the planet is the proliferation of the individually wrapped product. Nowadays products are marketed to us packaged in ever-smaller units (using, guess what, petroleum-based plastic). Of these products, I'd say "bottled water" ranks up there as the most ridiculous -- most specially in countries where tap water is safe to drink and tightly regulated, sometimes as a matter of national security.

* * *

There are many other examples out there of behaviours that we take for granted and, when regarded with a bit of thinking, make all this New Age crap about "Earth Hour" come across, quite frankly, as a crock of hypocritical crap.

Why do an "Earth Hour" when you can do an Earth Lifetime?

On that note, I shall go off and wonder how much fossil fuels were burnt producing the ads, printing the leaflets, and jetting around the world to promote "Earth Hour".

[This article was originally published by the author on the 30th of March 2009 in the now-defunct FilipinoVoices.com]

What it takes for Filipinos to learn from the presidency of Noynoy Aquino

2011-03-02T23:42:00.006+11:00

It's been eight months and there have been soooo many complaints about the performance of Philippine President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III. From his dud of an inaugural speech, his misinformed State of the Nation Addresss, the litany of gaffes and debacles in his handling of relations with erstwhile friendly foreign governments, his oft-exhibited bratty politicians' son behaviour, his broken promises, etcetera, etcetera... -- the list of things to complain about with regard to Noynoy's administration is long, and getting longer by the week. Perhaps there will come a time when a critical mass of gaffes and no-results outcomes is reached and a tipping point crossed. When that happens, talk of impeachment will surely come or, worse, winds of fiesta revolution.

My wish is that Noynoy remain President of the Philippines for the next five and a half years constituting the remainder of his term. Come hell or high water, Noynoy should sit in Malacanang and be the President. Filipinos deserve Noynoy, and deserve him over the next five and a half years.

Noynoy may keep reminding Filipinos that he was hoodwinked into running for President back in 2009 'til the cows come home as he does here:

When I was being asked to run, I did say there were people who came up to me and approached me and said, we know you will not be able to change our country from black to white. Perhaps, as my father would put it, our mission is to make it grey, the grey which is the in between step, lighter and lighter in shade until we get to the white. And we will be there with you. And so when I accepted the challenge of running first and then running this country, running for the campaign and then running this country. In the back of my mind, I was I accepting on behalf of all of the people who egged me to run. Therefore, those of you who are absent and not helping us, I hope my parents visit you one of these days.

But, see, the only thing that is relevant today is that he did run for President in 2009 and won. Perhaps he thought at the time that going into a "retreat" to seek "divine" guidance in that tough decision he had to make back then would dilute accountability for the result of that decision. Perhaps he thought then that God would be party to that milestone in Philippine history that saw him go down the road to Malacanang. Whether or not it is "God's will" (as that "retreat" would imply now) that Noynoy is the President of the Philippines today we will never know. God is something -- or someone -- better off understood when one is dead. For now, all of us who are subject to Noynoy's rule are alive. And much of the issues he needs to lead the Filipino people through are issues that are relevant to the living.

The irony that Filipinos need to come to terms with is that to learn from this unfortunate situation of having a man like Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III rule as President of the Philippines, Filipinos will need to subject themselves to his presidency for the full term that a President is obliged to serve. Choosing a man to be President is a responsibility and electing him to the Presidency is a commitment.

Filipinos deserve all of six years of a Noynoy Aquino presidency. We owe it to ourselves to learn from that experience.

Open defecation in Bangladesh applied to Filipinos' efforts to change

2011-02-28T20:31:00.014+11:00

I have often asserted that Filipinos are a people who are primarily driven by hiya (shame). Unmoved by any calls to higher purpose or noble pursuit, Filipinos continue to do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. As such I remain convinced that any political solution pitched as a "cure" to the malaise that grips the Philippines at the very threads that weave the very fabric of its society (whether it be the latest "messiah" running for office or the current top-down change initiative in vogue) delivers incremental improvements at best.

The reality we need to face is quite stark, however. The Philippines needs to change by leaps and bounds and nothing short of a tectonic shift in the thinking routinely applied by Filipinos in their day-to-day lives will be required for us to even just catch up with the rest of our major regional peers. The motivation needs to be primal -- one that comes from deep within the underbelly of the collective psyche of the Filipino.

A brilliant illustration of how this might possibly happen in the Philippines comes in the form of an account of how a poor village in Bangladesh named Mosmoil overcame a deeply entrenched tradition across Bangladesh of people depositing human waste in open public areas. The practice, called open defecation is the subject of a major section of the book The Big Necessity (Adventures in the World of Human Waste) by journalist Rose George who spent years documenting toilet habits across cultures all over the world. Poor rural villages across Bangladesh have for so long frustrated government efforts to eradicate the practice of open defecation which is the single biggest cause of disease and death among Bangladeshis.

George tells of how she comes across Indian agricultural scientist Kamal Kar who was hired as a consultant by WaterAid to find out why, despite huge sums spent by the government on building public latrines (toilets) in poor Bangladeshi communities, the prevalence of illnesses and disease associated with excrement has not diminished.

Apparently, people continue defecating in the open even in communities where public latrines had been built. In the course of his investigation, Kar discovered that WaterAid had been "asking the wrong question". He went on to formulate a groundbreaking approach to getting project communities to change their behaviours sustainably.

Here is an excerpt from The Big Necessity where this approach is described by author Rose George.

As Kar explained in a how-to guide to the method, 'It is important to stop in the areas of open defecation and spend quite a bit of time there asking questions and making other calculations while inhaling the unpleasant smell and taking in the unpleasant sight of large-scale open defecation. If people try to move you on, insist on staying there despite their embarrassment. Experiencing the disgusting sight and smell in this new way, accompanied by a visitor to the community, is a key factor which triggers mobilization.'

The calculations involved villagers doing their sums. They were asked to reckon how much excrement was being left in the open. 'The accumulated volume of faeces,' Kar wrote, 'is reckoned in units that can immediately be visualized by the community -- cart-loads, truck-loads, boat-loads. There is much amusement as people reckon up which family contributed the most shit to the pile that morning. But as the exercise goes on, the amusement turns to anxiety. People are horrified by the sheer quantity of excerement left in their village: "120,000 tons of shit is being dumped here every year? Where the hell does it all go?"'

The answer, as the villagers of Mosmoil figured out for themselves, is 'into their bathing ponds and rivers; and from there onto their clothes, their plates and cups, their hands and mouths. Onto the udders of their cows and into their milk. Onto the feet and hooves of their livestock, dogs, and chickens, and onto the flies that carry it straight to their food.' Eventually, the villagers of Mosmoil calculated that they were eating ten grams of each others' faecal matter a day. At this point, the brilliant core of Kar's method is revealed. The brilliant core is disgust.

Nothing like disgust for one's own distasteful practices and state of affairs galvanises one to act. And this is demonstrated in what happens next in Kar's account...

[...] after the faecal calculation, people started vomiting from the shock. Then Kar did something more shocking still. He left them to it, or threatened to. 'I said, "Carry on what you're doing. Your forefathers did it; you can do it. Good-bye."' The story as Kar tells it is suspiciously dramatic, but enough reports have been written on the Bangladesh programme that I believe him. Immediately, he says, the villagers were fired up with shame and disgust and determination. Children ran off to start digging latrine pits on the spot. The villagers swore that within two months 'not a single fellow would still be shitting in the open'. All this took place without a penny of subsidy being dispensed. No latrines had been supplied, no technical advice. In the how-to guide, Kar says that once disgust has been triggered, villagers may say that they can't afford a pit latrine. At that point, the facilitator can suggest a simple, low-cost design, emphasizing that it was created by poor people. Kar wanted to shift focus away from hardware. It didn't matter, he believed, if latrines were temporary. People would upgrade if they needed to. Once they'd seen the light of disgust they would do whatever was necessary.

Word of this approach spread fast, and as the author attests to, the programme racked up noted successes.

Perhaps the best approach to embedding permanent change in Philippine society is to build a sense of ownership over and accountability for both the solution and its benefits among Filipinos. It starts with a clear recognition by our own reckoning of the systems of cause-and-effect of the way we behave and take the journey of coming to a strong sense of shame and disgust with our own practices, our own character, our very selves.

Filipinos need to come to terms with their own version of Bangladesh's practice of open defecation and find in themselves the courage to feel disgust for themselves.

What the Twitter cat fight between Gringo Honasan and Jim Paredes reveals about the Edsa "spirit"

2011-02-27T16:47:00.008+11:00

I read with bemusement the catty exchange between Jim Paredes and Gringo Honasan that was immortalised on Twitter.com last Friday, the 25th February. Imagine two senior citizens of the Republic -- both household names and key figures in a "revolution" touted as one that defines Filipinos' place in history at that -- engaged in a tiff of the sort that would draw cheers and hoots the way a mud wrestling match would. Hold that thought and draw a hard association between that and this "spirit" of Edsa that we are supposed to re-visit, and there you have what the whole exercise was really all about.

I myself once quipped over Twitter: "You know who owns Edsa? ABS-CBN." Indeed, even in this one -- a "virtual round-table discussion" organised by Newsbreak.ph -- whilst everyone else came out of it as chumps, it was Big Media that ends up laughing all the way to the bank. Ka-ching! -- more content for the "news"!

Apply a bit of empathy in our effort to understand where each party in this little cat-fight was coming from and perhaps we may glean a bit of insight. Gringo the serial mutineer after 25 years probably still has an axe to grind with the "civil society" barons who hijacked his "revolution". Apo Jim Paredes for his part remains incensed by Philippine society's calculating warrior class's political aspirations; their alleged mission to seize power (what Jim probably refers to as their "agenda") that is diametrically opposed to the supposedly agenda-less fiesta of "the people".

As Amando Doronila noted in his recent Inquirer.net piece "Military hijacks EDSA 1 commemoration":

With the domination of the EDSA narrative by the military sector, with their recollections of the events leading to the ouster of Marcos, the celebration today, Feb. 25, of the hand-over of power to the civilian segment (people power) of the revolution, the climax of street uprising, has become anti-climactic. The recollections of the key military figures—Ramos, Enrile, Honasan—(see their reminiscences published in the Inquirer the past three days) hardly mentioned the importance of the unarmed people on EDSA in toppling Marcos. These were the people (everyone who was at EDSA) marching on foot on the highway, risking their lives to stop on Ortigas Avenue tanks advancing to attack Camp Crame.

Indeed, perhaps some of these civilians "risked" their lives on Edsa over those four days in 1986. But then as for the majority of the millions who were "there", this assertion becomes arguable. My own personal experience attests to the basis for the embarrassment I feel when those who were "there" are described as "heroes":

I doubt if any of the majority folk who were "there" and proclaim their "pride" in being there would have actually gone "there" if the scale of the unknown they faced was even half of the vastness and darkness of the unknown that Ramos, Enrile, Honasan, and the other RAM soldiers faced.

My personal experience was probably the same as 95 percent of city dwellers who trooped to Edsa in 1986. Prior to that we were all living -- under the regime of Ferdinand Marcos -- pretty normal lives. Our parents were all gainfully employed. We went to parties in Makati and Corinthian Gardens. Going to Edsa to "be there" was not something that we perceived to be dangerous and was therefore an easy choice to make. It was literally a walk in the park.

Compare the chaotic massing of a throng of would-be "revolutionaries" in one of the Philippines' now-renowned street "revolutions", with a typical military operation which is always purposeful, defined around an objective or mission, and more often than not organised and led by commanders qualified to lead, and we can see how what Gringo and what Jim respectively represent differ fundamentally. This difference describes the starkness of the contrast between the sector of society who prevailed and now basks in the limelight of the foreground -- the civilian political complex that governs today -- and our armed forces who were relegated, and now languish silhouetted in the background.

The emo "civil society" today rules the Philippines with the flaccid wishy-washiness that is singularly characterised by a lack of a tangible mission, a lack of an enlightened direction, and a lack of a consistent tack. Perhaps as this flaccid no-results situation under the watch of the emo constituency passes its ironically celebrated 25th anniversary milestone, both the science of militarism and the expeditiousness of dictatorship begins to regain appeal among an increasingly disillusioned and impatient people.

Notwithstanding the glibness of this remark...

ABS-CBN own the "People Power" EDSA "revolution".

... there was, in hindsight, a method to the way emos hijacked the "revolution" of 1986. It was all showbiz.

Jim Paredes embodies the way "Edsa" was annexed as a lucrative asset by the ABS-CBN conglomerate and bound to a specific feudal clan -- through emotionally-charged song, dazzling dance, and nebulous symbolism, the cultural artifact now known simply as "Edsa" was created.

Indeed, as the Aquino family newsletter "reported" on the 25th of February 2011 festivities marking the silver anniversary of "Edsa" how "Music recharge[d] the Edsa spirit". Indeed, song and dance are the usual temporary relief measures we turn to every now and then to recharge from the more onerous task of facing reality. That the "Edsa" spirit constantly requires "re-kindling" using these cultural opiates is quite telling.

Heroism with trainer wheels: commemorating the Edsa People Power frolic

2011-02-25T17:08:00.009+11:00

Not being in Manila at the height of the festivities marking the 25th Anniversary of the Edsa "People Power" "revolution", I was relegated to some semblance of keeping tabs on events in real time via a live feed courtesy of Google set to display content with the keyword "edsa". The feed normally captures news reports as they come through the wire. Unfortunately it also captures "tweets" made on the popular "social media" website Twitter.com. So literally every second, some kind of update from someone somewhere in the world with something to say with "edsa" in it scrolls in.

My first thought was something I put out, where else, on a tweet:

Is everyone in Edsa crouched over tapping on their phones and laptops? What's up with all the tweeting? There's a real world out there!

By my reckoning, about 75 percent of the tweets involved text strings composed of combinations of the words "happy", "25th", "anniversary", "edsa", "revolution", "proud", and "Filipino" (or "Pinoy"). That leaves about 25 percent that one can consider exception cases.

It seems that dominating these exception cases are re-tweets of three specific tweets that were on the "Top updates" section of the feed (at the time I logged on to that Google feed page which was about 4pm AEST today):

Edsa 86 was People Power Revolution, not economic or industrial revolution. Not fair to say it failed just because poverty still around. (tweeted by amfezam)

EDSA revolution was initiated by one person, sharing the same ideals with many. Change always comes from a single person, and that is me. (tweeted by agot_isidro)

people can talk about remembering EDSA all they want but if the Marcoses' crimes aren't put on schoolbooks, they will disappear (tweeted by hotmanila)

All head-scratchers if you ask me, considering that they can all be considered to fall under a class of existential microblog drivel that derives saving grace mainly from the fact that they were all limited to just 140 characters. Pity the other fools in Mainstream Media who manage to churn out thousands of words with no more than as much meaning or substance as the above three.

Considering that even some people who were actually physically "there" in 1986 struggle to derive some meaning from the "experience", it is quite surprising that some adults today who were too young to give a shit back in 1986 had something to say. I do admire though the small minority who demonstrated a rare clarity of mind with regard to this "revolution". A good specimen of this rare clarity was this gem I came across:

i do admire people who joined EDSA rev..their courage and patriotism.. but sorry, I can't seem to appreciate it. dont know why (tweeted by jan_wewesam)

I might offer that most civilians monumentally fail to get it (even as they try their dandest to articulate something). That's because there is not much about the "experience" to get. Not too many people risked much going there. Indeed, the only people I'd consider to have had put it all on the line were the soldiers who holed themsleves up in Camp Crame, notably led by then Lt. Gen. Fidel Ramos and Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile. Back then there was none of the familiar herd mentality that made it easy for subsequent Edsa "heroes" to hit the streets. Enrile, Ramos, and the leader of the "Reform the Armed Forces Movement" (RAM) Lt. Col. Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan and their band of renegade soldiers were pretty much alone. They faced the unknown and even possible death.

I doubt if any of the majority folk who were "there" and proclaim their "pride" in being there would have actually gone "there" if the scale of the unknown they faced was even half of the vastness and darkness of the unknown that Ramos, Enrile, Honasan, and the other RAM soldiers faced.

My personal experience was probably the same as 95 percent of city dwellers who trooped to Edsa in 1986. Prior to that we were all living -- under the regime of Ferdinand Marcos -- pretty normal lives. Our parents were all gainfully employed. We went to parties in Makati and Corinthian Gardens. Going to Edsa to "be there" was not something that we perceived to be dangerous and was therefore an easy choice to make. It was literally a walk in the park. Therefore there was nothing "heroic" about being there. Perhaps with enough of a stretch of imagination, it can be considered to be "patriotic". But then that is by the generally loose definition of patriotism that Filipinos are renowned for taking to heart. After all, being on Edsa in 1986 and wearing a yellow shirt pretty much qualified one for the distinction of being a "participant" in this supposedly momentuous occasion that we commemorate today.

By the way, I saw on the news that (now former) Philippine Congressman Ronald Singson had been sentenced to 18 months in prison in Hong Kong after getting caught at the airport carrying a vial of cocaine in his jocks. Perhaps many folk missed this bit of news today because they were all too busy being "proud" to be "Filipino".

The persistent myth of economic growth

2011-02-24T12:09:00.010+11:00

Development in understanding in recent years is making real limits on growth a lot more palpable since it is becoming quite evident that our approach to measuring economic value and the costs of acquiring said "value" (i.e. our monetary system) is woefully incomplete. Yet economic growth remains the be-all-end-all that pervades every aspect of human aspiration. Corporations scramble over one another to get into the next market to expand into. Shoppers are continually trawling vast malls looking for the next must have. Credit is wantonly extended to grease the entire endeavour.

Consider the resource water. We see water as a virtually "free" resource. Because we think of it as "free", we use copious amounts of it -- we flush drinkable grades of this resource down our toilets and use it to wash our cars. Our monetary system is good at counting the costs and benefits of piping massive volumes of water to people's homes -- to the point that many households take the idea of water bursting out of a tap at a quick twist of the wrist for granted (which is why we perceive it as "free"). But what the monetary system does not count is the environmental cost of this "efficiency" -- costs, we are finding out now, when accumulated past a critical point may tip the ecosystem into a state that results in this once abundant resource simply vanishing in the blink of an eye (relative to geological timescales) or gushing in in destructive quantities.

Little trinkets imported all the way from China are another one of those perceived "free" resources. They seem free (or cost next to nothing) because we've developed technologies and systems that enable us to take vast amounts of raw material from the Earth and turn these into vast quantities of "products" that can be sold for more money than the monetary cost of said raw materials. The monetary system tells us such activities are "profitable" and the consultants will use this "fact" to tell us these activities "add value". And because they are "profitable" and "add value", more people start enterprises that undertake similar activities. Governments note the additional "value" added by every new "profitable" activity started and extols this as economic growth.

The monetary system (and the human-centric "economy" that it measures in its sadly limited way) scores the efficiency and productivity of the pipeline of human enterprise that extracts Earthly resources and turns these into consumable products and services. What the monetary system does not account for is the cost to the Earth of the waste products generated by this pipeline and the degradation caused by extraction of raw input into this pipeline.

The monetary system that measures the performance of the human economy rewards development of humans' capability to acquire and accumulate and assumes an infinite capacity in the planet to support the means to acquire and accumulate.

So the concept of "generating wealth" (which increasingly seems to be a euphemism to mask a flawed assumption that economic growth is limitless) may no longer be a long-term option. The more pragmatic approach seems to be more around sustaining living standards for those who are already wealthy and hitting the brakes on escalating commitments for those who are still poor.

The concept of perpetually pursuing "growth" is a modern-day abomination created by an extremist free market system and, specifically, publicly-traded equity instruments driven by "investors" (or, more appropriately, parasitical equity traders) pursuing short-term "capital" gains. Unfettered population growth, "open" markets, and "deregulation" all contribute to lubricating and steepening the already slippery slope to the catastrophic collapse long ago foreseen by Jared Diamond in his seminal book Collapse. He makes this biting observation of a small cross-section of the fatal flaw in the concept of "globalisation" that is increasingly becoming evident but continuously swept under the rug...

It's really ironic that the British Empire was founded on exploiting poor, helpless third world countries by getting those countries to export their raw materials to Britain, who would then export back its finished products. Now let's think of the situation in modern Australia. Japan, the most forested country in the first world, is buying timber from the least forested country in the first world. They're buying it at very low prices, as woodchips, then it processes them in Japan, so the value increases by a hundred, and then Japan proceeds to export TV sets and cars back to Australia. Yet Australia is not some ignorant third world country. Why is [the government] so economically short-sighted as to export cheaply something that is in such desperately short supply here, so that they can buy their expensive TV sets and cars from Japan? It's as if the Japanese government were manipulating the Australian Prime Minister.

Big enough problems in the First World, think now of what this means to basketcase Third World countries like the Philippines. We continue to mask an obvious runaway addiction to locking ourselves into commitments we are inherently unable to honour by prostituting ourselves to foreign "investment" and deregulated foreign trade without a commensurate improvement in our ability to produce and sustain.

Senator Bongbong Marcos's safe assertion: Philippines could be Singapore today if not for Edsa I

2011-02-22T22:47:00.006+11:00

Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. in a recent statement made crack that the Philippines "should have been a Singapore" by now if the Edsa "People Power" "revolution" of 1986 had "not prospered". This is of course debatable and an easy assertion to make since it is by all intents and purposes unknowable and unprovable anyway.

But, see, that this assertion is debatable now highlights a revealing point. Back in the lead up to this "revolution" of 1986, to consider the Philippines continuing under the rule of then President Marcos meant pondering the unthinkable. Ask any mid-1980's Filipino schmoe how he or she foresaw the Philippines if Marcos was not replaced, and it is almost certain that his or her reply would describe a bleak scernario -- a Philippines shrouded by darkness and severely stunted economically, its people cowed by fear.

Thus the rallying cry of the time: Tama na, palitan na.

Enough is enough. Let's replace President Marcos.

The thinking there was categorical: Marcos = Failure.

But then fast forward to 2011 and those same words -- shrouded by darkness and severely stunted economically, its people cowed by fear -- can, as it turns out, be said to describe the Philippines today to some reasonable degree.

So whereas an assertion that the Philippines could be a Singapore under the continued rule of Ferdinand Marcos back in 1986 would have elicited a categorical No way!, the same assertion made today would now be considered debatable. From a perceived impossibility, to being debatable -- the point had become moot now that we had proven to ourselves that 25 years of "freedom" from tyranny hardly made a difference as far as our economic fortunes go. We had become a food-insecure, environmentally-devastated, and over-populated country ruled by morons who acquired their office by virtue of the popular vote.

Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the 1986 "People Power" "revolution" simply highlights this in-your-face reality about how we over the last quarter century turned what was once thought to be a golden egg into a little brown turd. In the process the once unthinkable alternative presented to us in 1986 -- continued rule under Ferdinand Marcos -- became something that could now be pondered in hindsight.

Remembering the 1986 Edsa "revolution"

2011-02-21T22:44:00.003+11:00

I was a teenager in 1986 when the first Edsa "Revolution" erupted. The sound of this "eruption" for me was the murmer of a crowd queueing at a fishball stand or playing pusoy dos with their pals on a sidewalk while smoking Marlboro "Blue Seals". An anticlimactic account, yes, but the thing about the first Edsa "revolution" was that it came together spontaneously as ordinary people milled rather than massed into Edsa as what was to become the seminal event emerged from the collective stand. Indeed, back then the stand was clear, the phenomenon was emergent, and the sponteneity was very evident. That phenomenal nature underpinned by such clarity cannot be replicated -- specially if the attempt is engineered by people with top-down agendas (as what's happened since). For the first Edsa revolution was, at its most fundamental, a bottom-up movement.

More strongly imprinted in my memory was the sound of the clatter of my friend's reporter's vest -- weighed down by a clutter of Opposition knick-knacks fastened to it -- whenever we marched in and out of rallies. He had been collecting Yellow Army paraphernalia since 1983 when Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr was assassinated. There was quite an assortment of them -- yellow buttons with Ninoy's iconic two-tone black-and-white image printed on it and various anti-Marcos badges and pins flashing logos of the "movements" of the time: ATOM (August Twenty One Movement) and CAPM (Cory Aquino for President Movement) among others.

I was a card-carrying member of the CAPM back then and no less than the venerable Howie Severino -- who was our English Comp/Lit teacher -- led our volunteer group on a campaign trail that took us from the very ends of Laguna province to various rallies against the government-run Channel 4 and pickets in front of the Romualdez-owned Rustan's Department Store in Makati. As CAPM members we got a free yellow shirt with the image of Cory Aquino printed on it on top of the words "Cory Aquino for President". She was the winnable candidate in the Snap Presidential Election organised by President Ferdinand Marcos. I remember being at the miting de avance to end all miting de avances for years to come in Luneta where a huge crowd gathered to mark the culmination of Cory's campaign.

The newspapers of choice of the self-described "revolutionary" in the 1980's were the then little underground "subversive" Davids known as the Inquirer and Malaya which were seen to be heroically going up against the Goliaths of the industry at the time Bulletin Today (which went on to morph into the Manila Bulletin) and the now defunct Daily Express. Because these little "revolutionary" papers were so "underground" they presumably didn't have the resources to openly do proper reporting at acceptable journalism standards. So the hearsay reporting of these journals were pretty much excuseable at the time. In fact they were pure gold considering that every "subversive" factoid and news snippet that slipped through the draconian press censorship of the Marcos government was gobbled up hungrily by our adolescent "revolutionary" minds. Little did we know that such dismal levels of journalistic standards would become institutionalised and deeply-entrenched into the industry culture in the subsequent post-Marcos quarter-century. Indeed, we can see with the benefit of hindsight how an investment in the winnable one back in the 1980's turned into a huge payback for the owners of these little rags (now the Media Oligarchs of today) and elevated those who wrote for them into the revered demagogues that today imprison the 21st Century Filipino mind.

It didn't help too that the handing back of the ABS-CBN Network to the Lopez Dynasty (rightfully so, to be fair) after Marcos's fall was made out to be a seminal event associated with this Yellow "revolution" as well. It baked the ABS-CBN institution into the mystique of 1986 and wrapped a veneer of a kind of endorsement of its hallowed place in Philippine history that renders the content it infects our society with today virtually immune to critical scrutiny (kind of like how citing some weird stuff found in the Holy Bible evokes the primal fear of damnation that's been ingrained in most Catholics since birth).

My point is, the 1986 Edsa "Revolution" -- like the jeepney and many of our age-old traditions -- was a measure that served a specific purpose within a period of time characterised by a combination of circumstances that is most likely never to be seen again.

I cannot highlight enough the uniqueness of this coming together of stuff between 1983 and 1986 that led to:

Specificity of purpose within a;

Finite time frame; given a,

Combination of factors

When you've got that many variables and a unique string of values describing an event, the probability that the same environment will recur in the future is virtually nil. What then does that say about this supposedly worthwhile effort of keeping the "spirit" of Edsa "alive"? For me, it simply means remembering it, as I do fondly but with a tinge of realism as I bring subsequent hindsight to bear. But to expect something of it beyond its efficacy as a mere historical relic is a bit of a stretch. The reality is that there is nothing in the real future we face as a society today that begs for solutions of the kinds we would like to imagine are underpinned by the "legacies" of 1986.

Indeed, the future begs for our maturity as a democratic people. All that the legacy of the 1986 Edsa "Revolution" offers is an adolescent "eruption" that, in hindsight, is better off left along with the mullet and cobra hair-do's of the 1980's.

[NB: This was originally posted on AntiPinoy.com and was my entry to the 2010 Blog Action Day: The Real Heroes of EDSA sponsored by the Kabataan Party List commemorating the 1986 Edsa "Revolution"]

Have the advocates of Filipino reproductive health lost the plot?

2011-02-18T23:48:00.014+11:00

Of late, there is the issue of (1) "the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill" and (2) President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino's backflip on his earlier promise to prioritise it. Without having to get off my armchair and just from browsing the little niche of the Net that I inhabit, it seems the "advocates of the RH Bill" have been up at arms over the above two challenges -- getting the Bill passed in Congress and overcoming the hurdle of Noynoy's backflip on his promise.

What is wrong with this picture?

It often helps when one is merely a bemused outside observer. Because for me, the issue remains quite simple.

It is about:

(1) Poverty.

(2) Poverty as a habitual entering into commitments one is inherently unable to honour; and,

(3) Having children as a commitment to provide for their needs, raise them to be productive citizens, and to be there to provide guidance.

The issue -- of which the RH Bill is but a mere component -- is therefore quite broad and certainly a lot bigger than the solution to which, at the moment, a large proportion of the resources of the advocacy is being focused on. It is about poverty and the impact of the enormous number of Filipinos -- and the enormous rate of the increase of this already enormous number -- have on our prospects of overcoming our chronic impoverishment.

Politics is one route to take in the pursuit of a solution to this mess. But there are also other routes.

So back to my original question:

What is wrong with the picture painted in the first paragraph of this blog?

First of all, the advocacy is now known as the "RH Bill Advocacy" -- a sign that the movement may be losing the plot. The RH Bill is, as I mentioned earlier, but one component. Perhaps if the members of this advocacy want to remain focused on the whole point of it (and therefore maintain an open mind to the set of solutions available out there) -- then perhaps they should consider referring to themselves by a term more closely associated to said point -- like, say, the "anti-overpopulation advocacy".

Second, we've always known that Noynoy is a dud of a president. So why then do we continue to make him the epicentre of our hopes and dreams? That's kind of like putting all of our eggs in one basket as the tired old cliché goes, isn't it?

And, third, the landscape of the whole advocacy is framed by politics. Again as I mentioned earlier, politics is only one means to an end. History offers a wealth of case studies of deep and widespread change that happened without politics at the forefront to spearhead it. This very platform -- "social media" -- upon which we now execute most of these "advocacies" itself is an example of a non-political change agent that effected vast and profound change in our way of life and the way we interact with one another. As a matter fact, it is politics that is clumsily trying to catch up with those of us who have become adept in the use of "social media".

The picture is wrong because it has become such a small one. Time to step back and regard the bigger picture, folks! The advocacy needs to be de-politicised so that a clearer line of sight to the point can be maintained.

So let's ask ourselves -- what is the real point? Is it to see the RH Bill passed? Or is it to control the enormous rate of increase of Filipinos' already enormous numbers? The nature of the words used, alone, already tells how much of the point of all this we remain cognisant of.

Reproductive Health and Mortal Sin: Filipinos know better

2011-02-18T10:39:00.007+11:00

The Catholic Church has been progressively taking its gloves off in recent weeks as it steps up its Inquisition against the "evils" of the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill being pushed by law makers and activists alike. In a recent development marking the Church's steepest descent yet into its old Medieval habits, a local parish issued a statement where it said that it will refuse communion to people who support the RH Bill.

Short of implying that people who support the RH Bill are evil, the Parish Pastoral Council of Santuario de San Jose in Mandaluyong City encouraged those who favoured the passing of the RH Bill to cleanse their soul through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

"In this connection, we would like to advise parishioners who promote or support the RH Bill NOT (repeat NOT) to receive Holy Communion until they go to Sacramental Confession and renounce the RH Bill," read the statement, which is now circulating in social networking sites.

Going by the strict code of Catholic catechism, people who are in a "state of sin" are barred from the receiving the Holy Sacrament (the ritual of eating a piece of wafer that represents the "body and blood of Christ" usually handed out by a priest during a Catholic religious service).

"The Church forbids receiving Holy Communion if we are not in a state of grace, meaning we have not committed a mortal sin. Because the RH Bill is inherently immoral and evil, recommending, supporting, defending, promoting and practicing its provisions and tenets constitute a mortal sin against many of the 10 commandments," it said.

Well, let me tell you about what it means to be in this "state of grace" required for us to receive this much-vaunted "Holy Communion" that the Church is using as the proverbial gun held up to us sinners' heads.

* * *

What is "mortal sin"?

According to Vatican doctrine, a person commits Mortal Sin when three "conditions" are met: when the offense is "grave", and committed with "full knowledge" and "deliberate consent".

Still scratching your head?

Join millions of others including the most formidable minds in human history. The concept of "sin" much less its variants and subsets defies definition. By the very ironic admission of the very men-in-robes who make these idiotic pronouncements and write these brain-dead "pastoral letters", it is only God in his "infinite wisdom" that can truly judge who has and who has not sinned. The Catholic Encyclopaedia contains volumes of verbal diarrhoea on the subject and a search for examples of "mortal sin" yields unsatisfying results at best and bullshit on the average. Indeed, there is no such concept of "mortal" or "venial" sin in the Holy Bible, which means that all this is no more than a crock cooked up by the bejewelled princes of Rome.

Why does "mortal sin" defy definition?

Simple. Because unlike ideas produced by real philosophy and real science, theological concepts are backward-engineered from dogma.

The exercise of philosophical and scientific inquiry is a discipline where ideas are progressively revealed while seeking to validate hypotheses that are regarded to be unsound until proven otherwise. In contrast, theology seeks to cough up some semblance of logical and structural rigour to prop up ideas that are held to be valid by edict.

The result is a convoluted system of thinking the vacuousness of which becomes evident when one seeks answers. This is where the Catholic Church and its army of clerics derive their power. With this deliberate confusion created in the minds of the "faithful", Church clerics will always have a job, as people who lack the faculties to seek and evaluate information will always be inclined to seek their "services".

* * *

This useless anxiety built around the nebulous concept of "sin" created by the Church is therefore a powerful tool that we now see being wielded in this "crusade" against the RH Bill. Who, for that matter, can be considered to be truly in this nebulous "state of grace"? If I were to make a guesstimate of the proportion of Filipinos who see themselves as being as full of grace as the Mary they hail, I'd say 97 percent of Filipinos consider themselves pure enough of spirit to receive the Holy Sacrament. Step into a typical Filipino Catholic Sunday mass, and you will see most of the congregation queueing up to receive the little white round "bread" handed out by the priest towards the end of the "service".

That is considering that even harbouring an "impure thought" constitutes a fall from this "grace", if we are to believe Catholic rulings. If this ruling is taken seriously by Filipinos, then we would need to outsource "Confession" services to India and China to keep up with demand for "services" to re-establish "grace" in Filipinos' souls!

If Filipinos are independent-minded enough to deem themselves de facto worthy to queue up to receive the "Body and Blood of our Lord", then perhaps they can take the same logical leap and apply the same independent mind when it comes to considering Reproductive Health in their country.

Why indeed should we not bury former President Ferdinand Marcos at the Fort McKinley Libingan ng mga Bayani?

2011-02-16T23:23:00.005+11:00

Why not bury former President Ferdinand E. Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Filipino Heroes' Cemetery)? That is the question that came to light recently in the wake of the burial there of former Secretary and retired General Angelo Reyes, who was in the middle of being implicated in a big-time corruption scandal at the time of his death on the 8th of February this year. Marcos's son, Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr today "reiterated his call for the burial of his father, the late former President Ferdinand Marcos, in the Libingan ng mga Bayani". Television personality Karen Davila was quoted by ANC 24/7 as having quoted Bongbong saying that "if Angelo Reyes was buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, my late father should also be buried there".

So why not? He was President of the Philippines for two decades after all and, like Angelo Reyes, was never convicted for his crimes. Indeed, his son is a Philippine Senator and his wife, former First Lady Imelda Marcos is a member of the House of Representatives. As far as I can tell, none of Marcos's top military officers or Cabinet members were taken to account for the alleged "crimes" perpetrated during his 20-year rule. Among the architects of the much maligned Martial Law of the 70's can be counted former President Fidel Ramos who is widely respected for the administration he ran in the 90's. Marcos's Minister of Defense and right-hand-man at the height of his dictatorship, Juan Ponce Enrile, is now Senate President.

Indeed, take stock of the political landscape of today and the who's-who of the folks in power today with eyes uncoloured by the Aquinoist propaganda that dominated much of the last 25 years, and one would be hard-pressed to imagine Ferdinand Marcos as the bad guy he is made out to be.

Credit this to an astounding 25 years of a lack of results spanning the year 1986 when Marcos was deposed in a so-called "people power" "revolution" through to today, or for that matter, the 25th of February of this year which marks the Silver Anniversary of this "revolution". This lack of results is vast in scope -- from a lack of closure on much of the "crimes" supposedly committed by Marcos and his henchmen, a flaccid effort to recover the loot he allegedly made off with, and, most glaringly obvious, the lack of progress in the overall condition of Philippine society.

Compared to other societies where swift -- and often harsh -- justice was dealt their respective despots once they were ousted from power, the Philippines simply muddled along in its renowned flaccid form over those last 25 years chanting slogans peppered with words like "social justice", "vigilance", and "hope" in a sad monumental effort to mask an underlying lack of real national substance.

Perhaps then, former President Ferdinand E. Marcos is entitled to a decent burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. We have, after all, come full circle and now need to come to terms with the in-your-face realisation that it was not Marcos or his legacy after all that accounts for the lack of any real progress in the Philippines.

Why the Church failed to make its position on the RH Bill intellectually appealing

2011-02-15T19:28:00.005+11:00

The forces of modernism are in the midst of a fight for the progression of the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill. That powerful bastion of Filipino-style primitivism, the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), has in recent months brought to bear its vast fear mongering communication channel -- the "Holy" Catholic Mass -- to disseminate its threats of fire and brimstone to those in its flock who dare harbour impure thoughts on contraception. Among those who had so far succumbed to this might is no less than Philippine President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III who earlier withdrew from a commitment to prioritise reproductive health in his list of legislation to push.

Though most ordinary Filipinos are generally verbally silent on their views on matters of sexuality and reproductive health, the general practice of the society speaks for itself. Sexual imagery and references pervade the Philippine Media many of which border on sexism and even the pornographic. Being the bad copy cats that Filipinos are, our embrace of what is really just a deep liberal secularism generally practiced in Western society, produces the contrived and confused flavour of "modern values" that Filipinos exhibit. In the same way that our embrace of American-style capitalism had produced a perverse and often tacky spectacle of runaway consumerism and tasteless tingi-tingi entrepreneurship, an embrace of a liberal regard for sex produced the banal lasciviousness that underlies much of Philippine cinema and noontime television.

This was something I explored in my book where I made the following observation...

More disturbing than simply being uncomfortable is how inconsistent and misguided Filipino responses to issues of sexuality can get. The Filipino Male enjoys the better half of a double standard that prevails in Philippine society. And this is what contributes much to the bizarreness of Filipinos’ regard for sex. Male sexual indiscretion, as mentioned earlier, is routinely tolerated and even encouraged and cheered (the famously philandering Joseph Estrada was even elected president). Filipino men are predisposed to openly and indiscreetly staring at and regarding women maliciously. These indiscretions are clearly outside the more well-known but imagined Filipino virtues of modesty, humility, and adherence to tradition. They are nonetheless widespread and accepted as normal (although desensitised may be the more appropriate word to describe Philippine society’s acceptance of this Filipino male condition), but there is presently no Filipino philosophy or code of ethics to frame this condition, it being outside the Tradition-Religion Complex that many Filipinos continue to “officially” validate themselves with. Thus the Filipino male – with all his expected indiscretions and excess – is a social aberration that is accepted, yet at the same time, is not normal and oftentimes unsavoury.

Perhaps if the Church had somehow built their case against the RH Bill (specifically its implications on sexual conduct) around a conceptual framework harvested from this notion of a deeply confused Filipino psyche surrounding sexuality, it would have gained more traction among people who think and, consequently, those who are able to influence our society's thought leaders.

Instead, the Church in its crusade against Filipino reproductive health played the tired medieval morality card it had, well, dogmatically applied -- often with murderous force -- over the last couple millennia. This is of course most likely an outcome of the sort of inbred thinking that festers within an institution that remains averse to free inquiry. Unfortunately for the Church, this insular and paranoid protection of the traditional integrity of the dogma that imprisons its clergy's minds is what prevented it from coming up with a more innovative approach to pitching its case to the more progressive circles of Philippine society.

Of course, the forces of modern thinking in Philippine society are by no means resting on their laurels considering that much of the Philippines is populated by weak-minded star-struck ignoramuses -- the sort of folk who tend to lap up much of what the officers of the mighty Roman Catholic Church have to say on most matters.

The issue that trumps most other things in the Philippines, of course, remains over-population; and so the risk of an already adolescent regard for sex in Philippine society being exacerbated by increased permissiveness licensed by access to artificial contraceptives and clinical information about safe sex is certainly an acceptable one considering the immense benefits of a prospective reduction in our rate of population growth. For that matter, this risk of the Filipino's penchant for perverting modern ideas infecting our collective sexuality is nothing that better education and better upbringing cannot mitigate as well -- specifically the sorts focused on highlighting personal accountability. That may be the next battlefield where the next war against the primitivist dogma of the Church may be fought.

Love and other vices on Valentines Day

2011-02-12T17:32:00.002+11:00

Valentines Day. This day always brings out the best and worst in people. It’s hard not to feel sorry for the rest of the population whether they be men or women, or boys or girls who feel left out on that day -- a day which in the cosmic scheme of things is really just another 24-hour segment in the Earth's journey through space and time as it orbits the sun.

I tried to look into why Valentines Day is celebrated and two sources gave me convoluted accounts (and almost bored me to tears) but both referred to it as the day for lovers to express their undying love for one another. Hello? Does one really have to assign a designated day for couples who are already committed to each other to engage in ritualistic -- and expensive -- expressions of romantic affections?

One might argue that in a free world, people are free to do anything they want. And the Day of Hearts is, after all, a pretty harmless tradition. Or is it? For their part, marketers and advertisers are also free to influence and persuade, as they engage in the lucrative trade of creating "human needs" where there need not be any, and occasions to consume where a bit more (but less costly) substance and meaning would have sufficed. So it seems to me that it is not an entirely harmless tradition; and as such my thoughts go out especially to those who find it a challenge to conform.

There may be millions of people who feel alienated when such occasions are celebrated. Can anyone remember the suicide pact made by 32 people in the U.S. who planned to kill themselves on Valentines Day in 2005 because they were unhappy about the day and their lives in general? It would have been an immense tragedy had the plot not been uncovered by the police. Extreme, to be sure, but regardless of whether one is merely melancholic or insanely suicidal on that day, the whole exercise is a real waste of emotional energy considering that if we take a bit of time to reflect, we realise that such anxieties are really so unnecessary; hardly the "human need" that clever marketers would have us believe it is.

Let's spare a thought for those who have no one to love or those who had just lost the love of their life. Single people in every society can end up feeling inadequate when subjected to the big hoo-ha surrounding V-day. In fact, people who find themselves unattached on a Valentines Day, will more than likely get pestered with "Don't you have a date tonight?" intrusions to one's personal space. Non-compliance to the occasion makes one a pathetic sod to be ostracized and be subject to stoning. I think it's a bit tacky of people to be making comments like that even if they think it is harmless.

I used to think it made sense that people should be going out with someone on V-Day. Now I only see a society exerting too much pressure on people to hook up. I think the biological imperative is powerful enough without that pressure. Being with someone will only be a wonderful experience if that someone you end up with can actually complete you (to cite the old cliché). Oftentimes, people just compromise on taste (and, worse, on common sensibility) and end up with someone they are not compatible with just to look good to others and to conform.

If you are a man, you would be pretty slack if the only time you make your girlfriend or wife feel special is on Valentines Day. If you are a woman, you are a bit shallow if you think that just because your man doesn't take you out or give you something special on Valentines Day, it's already the beginning of the end of your relationship. It's like self-flagellation during the Easter holidays, same psychology, different occasion.

A progressive neglect to deliver the token flowers, cards, and that 3000-peso dinner -- what I call Valentinian Omissions -- apparently is an insidious cancer of the typical relationship. I know of a few couples who get into nasty arguments over Valentinian Omissions. All the while each party piles these little "omissions" on what becomes a massive list that is brought to bear come the time when Splitsville is in the horizon. Maybe your partner will appreciate you more if you don't make a big deal of such occasions from the very start. They will feel less pressured to cook up or come up with something to make you feel "loved".

Put all of what's been said so far in its own box and you are left with what Valentines Day really is -- just another cannon in the clever marketer's arsenal. Retailers count on such days to make up for their customers' sensible expenditure over most of the year. Thus the flowers being dearer on the day itself is a no-brainer. And just think of all the waste the activity is generating, with all the tiny Teddy Bears with little hearts and the Valentines card that are being sold that end up... Well, at least the cards are recyclable.

The more stuff that's bought and discarded for every occasion celebrated the worse it is for our environment (stop for a moment and have a think, for example, how much of the stuff that was given to you last Christmas is still in use). Mother Nature suffers so that we can alleviate an "anxiety" that started out as a concept drawn out on a marketing jock's flipchart.

But who cares about the environment? As long as we're having fun, right?

Don't worry if you've already made plans, as I said, this is not about you. Please don't let this ruin your date. After all, as our politicians would have us believe, in these times of financial crisis, we need to heed the call for a heroic shelling out of our wads for a dinner by candlelight. Your country needs you!

The age of "people power revolution" needs to be supplanted by a modern "institutionalisation revolution"

2011-02-10T22:44:00.014+11:00

What do (1) the disastrous ascent to power of Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III, (2) the crystallisation of trial-by-media into the backbone of Philippine criminal justice, and (3) an over-reliance on noise-making and stunts to instigate change movements all have in common? Answer: people power. The idea that spectacular and noisy mass movements -- in all their chaotic and unstructured glory -- can result in a deep structural change of the sort that yields enduring value started in the Philippines with the transpiring of the 1986 Edsa "Revolution".

Before the 1986 Edsa "Revolution", Filipinos have always had their state governance frameworks delivered shrink-wraped onto their doorstep. Spanish colonial rule, the American Commonwealth government, and the post 1946 "independent" American-style presidential government were all imported off-the-shelf governance applications. The Edsa "Revolution" of 1986, on the other hand, is seen to be an all-Filipino invention, and therefore has become much beloved. And indeed it is a very much a Pinoy-originated concept. The manner by which it started is true-blue Filipino -- a one-time perfect storm coalescing of kibitzers into a crowd that formed a movement by sheer numbers -- a story not too different to Nick Joaquin's account in his seminal essay "A Heritage of Smallness" of how the magnificence of that quintessential source of "Filipino Pride", the Banaue Rice Terraces, came to be not by any contrived design but by a dynamic not too different from the Edsa "Revolution"...

About the one big labor we can point to in our remote past are the rice terraces--and even that grandeur shrinks, on scrutiny, into numberless little separate plots into a series of layers added to previous ones, all this being the accumulation of ages of small routine efforts (like a colony of ant hills) rather than one grand labor following one grand design. We could bring in here the nursery diota about the little drops of water that make the mighty ocean, or the peso that's not a peso if it lacks a centavo; but creative labor, alas, has sterner standards, a stricter hierarchy of values. Many little efforts, however perfect each in itself, still cannot equal one single epic creation. A galleryful of even the most charming statuettes is bound to look scant beside a Pieta or Moses by Michelangelo; and you could stack up the best short stories you can think of and still not have enough to outweigh a mountain like War and Peace.

Scrutinise what really went on at the street level during the Edsa "Revolution" and you will find no more than a motley tara-let's crowd of individuals who each harboured no higher purpose beyond an instinct to gravitate to where the happening scene was. This was, after all, pre-Internet 1986, when you actually had to physically go somewhere to socialise and pick up girls.

The 1986 Edsa "Revolution" ingrained into an entire generation of Filipinos the notion that great things can be accomplished by simply crowding together and chanting a slogan while waving fists. This notion stuck and remains in the national psyche today in the age of armchair-accessible "social networking". What was once physical crowding became a comfier and less hazardous digital sign-up crowding where "Netizens" indicate their "support" by merely "Liking" a digital abstraction. The precursor for all this was Vicente "Enteng" Romano's eLagda Movement launched at the turn of the 21st Century which was one of the first "on-line petitions" used in Philippine politics. It aimed to gather one million "digital signatures" ("eLagda" is a tagalog digitalism that is a direct translation of the term) in a bid to demonstrate popular support for the call for then President Joseph "Erap" Estrada to resign.

The trouble is, while physical crowding was quite a spectacle to behold, digital crowding is an illusion at best. Look into the Facebook account of any teenager, and you will most likely find hundreds of "fan pages" to which he or she is signed up with (i.e. "Liked" or "Follows" in the "social media" vernacular). So, say, a "movement" page like the "We Support Heidi Mendoza" site on Facebook may amass the numbers, it remans no more than a quaint artifact among millions of similar others (as of this writing that page only had 2,592 "Likes").

So today Filipinos are conditioned to believe that, a "people's mandate" on whatever, be it the election of a president, a mass fixation on a Senate "inquiry" or a noise barrage at the Ateneo, makes valid whatever this "mandated" person or notion is. Trouble is, in a Country of the Vacuous, the soundness of the popular notion remains suspect. The progressive discrediting of Noynoy Aquino (a product of a landslide vote), the chastisement of the witch-hunting Senators (who are so because of the vote and not by any other qualification) "investigating" corruption in the military, and the joke that popular sentiment (so because of people wearing a shirt, sporting a button, or "Liking" a page) has become now all point to a palpable progressive degeneration of the once lofty but nebulous concept of "people power".

Unfortunately, the proud Filipino tradition of crowding and singing or chanting in emotion-charged lockstep does not build much. Poets today still, at their best, grapple with how "people power" is actually harnessed or manifested and, at their worst discount the outcomes of due process governed by institutions in favour of raw displays of mob muscle. What these modern-day poets don't seem to grasp is that we need structures to channel most forms of energy -- say, a nuclear reactor to harness energy released in nuclear fission, or institutions to harness that elusive "will of the people" that is so cherished by those who aspire to be truly democratic.

But institutions require working systems and structures. And to build systems and structures that work requires clear purpose, rigorous planning, and clever engineering -- skills and undertakings that Filipinos have shown not much of an aptitude for.

So then:

Perhaps, the "people power revolution" era needs to be superseded by an institutionalisation "revolution" era.

In the aftermath of such a hypothetical "revolution", Filipinos will defer to more systemic approaches to securing sustained favourable outcomes for themselves -- i.e., institutionalising routine consistency in the way we respond to challenges rather than having to bahala-na or pwede-na-yan our way out of every tight situation of our own making that comes our way.

In what form this "institutionalisation revolution" will come, nobody knows. But maybe we can begin by imagining how it could be made to transpire.

Retired General Angelo Reyes: a high price to pay for a "committee report"

2011-02-09T23:02:00.009+11:00

The Philippine Congress mirrors not only its constituents. It mirrors its constituents' favourite form of entertainment -- low-brow noon time variety shows like Wowowee. Not much comes out of Congressional "inquiries" and "hearings" other than an opportunity for our honourable politicians to rack up media exposure mileage. But while shows like Wowowee turn the desperation of its impoverished contestants into mass-audience entertainment, the entertainment value of Congress is more akin to a bullfight -- where a bloodthirsty audience cheers on a flamboyant matador's graceful ritual killing of a maddened beast.

I cited in a previous article "Willie Revillame can be President or a Senator someday, but not an SC Justice" a simple fact often overlooked when we rely on popularly-elected officials to hunt our witches for us. Initiatives of Congressmen and Presidents pitched as "investigations", "inquiries", and "fact finding" missions do not have an end inherent to them. These initiatives are ends in themselves -- vehicles to enable their instigators to be seen to be doing "good".

Compare these Executive and Legislative "inquiries" to the clear purpose inherent to the process of subjecting persons-of-interest to the criminal justice system as only the Judicial branch of government could. We can then begin to understand perhaps even a miniscule bit of what could have possibly driven former Secretary and retired General Angelo Reyes to an act of desperation (or honourable exit, as some prefer to see it).

To have your dignity stripped and reputation tarred in a pointless spectacle before a vacuous public probably proved to be too much to bear for Angelo Reyes.

Who knows, for that matter?

Fact is, Congressmen and Senators hold their positions only by virtue of the popular vote and not by any other qualification of any consequence applicable to the task of systematically uncovering the truth. These are basically men and women who, with no formal training in cross examination, investigation, and the scientific method are let loose to feast upon "persons of interest".

The instigator of the witch hunt himself, Senator Jose "Jinggoy" Estrada, admitted that the only tangible outcome of the Senate inquiry into AFP corruption is a "committee report" and a bahala na ("hope-for-the-best") prayer that the Department of Justice would run with their "findings"...

“Ako gusto ko na ring matapos lahat it [I also want everything to be finished]. Come out with a committee report, enact bills to reform budget system of the armed forces. Tapos bahala na yung [Afterwards, it’s up to the] Ombudsman, bahala na ang [It’s up to the] DoJ [Department of Justice] to prosecute,” he said.

And for that end, Angelo Reyes was turned into a maddened and bewildered bull.

To those who presume to judge former Secretary and retired General Angelo Reyes

2011-02-08T22:14:00.005+11:00

We, mere observers, who do not know former defense secretary and chief of staff retired General Angelo Reyes at a personal level only have the Law to frame our regard for him. Granted, Reyes was a primary suspect in the on-going probe of massive corruption in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). But in the eyes of the Law, he remains innocent for now as the Law presumes a person innocent until proven guilty.

Who are we to judge Angelo Reyes? Who are we to presume to judge the circumstances of his death -- an apparent suicide as the Media reports say? And if indeed, Reyes killed himself do we really believe that the state of his mind moments before his death could ever be knowable?

It looks, though, like the Roman Catholic Church begs to except itself from the limitations of human comprehension -- preferring to invoke their historically-guaranteed entitlement to the dispensation of a wrathful God's judgment over his faithful...

If a person committed suicide, he is not allowed a Christian burial.

This was what Caloocan Bishop Deogracias Iñiguez said in a Radyo Inquirer interview Tuesday regarding the alleged suicide of former Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes who was recently tagged in massive corruption in the military.

Iñiguez, however, said that Reyes could still be granted a Christian burial “if there is any doubt that it was a deliberate suicide or there were signs of repentance before he died.”

Coming across more as a sad bid to prop up some semblance of relevance in, as far as the bigger picture goes, a not-so-trivial setback to the state's efforts at uncovering the truth about the full extent of AFP corruption, the Church's manner in its weighing in on what should otherwise be an occasion of sober respect for the privacy of Reyes and his family highlights even more questions around the lofty place in Philippine society that it desperately clings to.

"But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests." - Luke 14:10

Perhaps the good Bishop of Caloocan should read his Bible a bit more so he does not end up making an ass of himself again in the future. Honourable winners of wars treat their enemy's dead with respect. For those who want to honour an "infinitely" just God, perhaps defer to his monopoly over any authority to judge the dead. And for us who aspire to be ruled by the laws we craft, let us then defer to its basic principle of presuming one to be innocent until proven guilty.

Subliminal messages lurking within Valentines Day marketing

2011-02-07T12:50:00.003+11:00

This week is the home stretch in the race to make Valentine's Day 2011 a happenin' day. Do consider though what Valentine's Day -- or any occasion celebrated with a spectacular display of conspicuous consumption -- really means. There are many disasters going on around us, not least relevant to Filipinos is the devastation caused by heavy rains and unstoppable flooding going on outside the awareness of most citizens of the Philippines' Imperial Capital.

Many crusaders for righteous indignation directed at the multitude of the Philppines' "evils" would just as soon march zombie-like to the subliminal beat that constitutes the bulk of the payload of modern-day cut-throat marketing. Dig deeper into the consequences of our mindless heeding of these omni-present messages and you will find the root causes of many of the world's ills -- environmental degradation, piling waste, pathological neediness and dependence on petroleum.

Next time you (1) purchase a box of chocolates encased in polypropylene packaging and wrapped in paper made of wood pulp and dyed with all sorts of toxic chemicals, all of which, within a day of purchase, will end up in a bin destined for a landfill, (2) get in your SUV with this token of affection and spend 90 percent of your 2-hour travel time to your girlfriend's house idling in Manila's appalling traffic, and (3) stroll along the faux-cobblestoned corridors of a mall airconditioned with juice generated from coal-fired power plants, try to pause and think of what is inducing all this otherwise irrational behaviour that causes us unnecessary stress and anxiety.

I offer three key messages that lace the marketing blitzes mounted by Big Business every Valentine's Day on which the weak minds of the average consumer rely on to justify their love life anxieties.

* * *

You need to make your partner feel "special".

If you fell for this one, you are probably suffering from some guilt issues over not delivering on your promise to induce feelings of specialness in your partner over the rest of the 364 days in the year. Perhaps consider then that deeper relationship issues may be at work here and that you and your partner may need to work on implementing a less flamboyant and more sustainable expression of affection for one another, perhaps one with real substance and not the lipstick-on-a-pig panelwork that a traditional Valentine's Day extravaganza provides.

You and your partner deserve to reward yourselves.

Ask yourself then: What exactly have you done to "deserve" this"reward"? Refer to the first point for a clue to answering this question. If you had done a really great reward-worthy job over the rest of the 364 days of the year making your partner feel "special", then what's the point in believing in the whole concept of a "Valentine's Day"?

You're a loser if you don't have a date on Valentine's Day.

Yeah, you are too -- same thing when Christmas time, semestral break, summer vacation, or Holy Week comes around the corner. Without that special squeeze to be seen with at those trendy clubs, beach resorts, and chow outlets all of which will be beckoning with one or the other Valentine's Day "special" offerings of their services and products, society will flash the big "L" sign at you. Loser. Even Philippine President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III is hard at work getting himself laid, what with his driving around in sporty German automobiles and exquisite Japanese luxury SUVs that flash Latin names on their front grilles, his gonads are most certainly bursting to sow the royal Aquino DNA in the lead up to the day of luvv.

* * *

So is Valentine's Day really a day for lovers? Think again.

Heidi Mendoza: writing about something I have nothing much to say about

2011-02-03T21:14:00.003+11:00

I would like to write something about all the "revelations" about corruption in -- shockers! -- the Armed Forces of the Philippines. The trouble is, it's just too much trouble. In the constant din of digital chatter in "social media" and hearsay reports flying from one broadsheet to another in mainstream media, it gets difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. In our usual form, we've all but turned this into another Shawarma topic.

In the same way that we have doomed Filipino business sense to muddle along in small-time mediocrity, we now oversee the slow but steady degeneration of the national debate ironically as we celebrate an unprecedented increase in public participation using the latest Web applications. While an increase in participation is welcome and supposedly "keeps everyone honest", more content does not necessarily mean deeper knowledge or better quality insight.

Real insight comes from an ability to see patterns and relationships among bits of disparate pieces of information.

Contrast that with the way the output of traditional media tends to cluster around a narrow band of shawarma topics -- the latest tongue-wagging events (and the morons behind them) reported to the smallest value-crushing triviality.

The venerable thinker Nassim Taleb makes an interesting assertion: that regularly reading a newspaper (or any source of current events) follows the law of diminishing returns. With every detailed update and bulletin you take in from such sources, you actually gain less additional information for your trouble. Indeed, with the explosion of on-line content on people and events, the average schmoe now spends more time scouring a multitude of references to get the "full picture". Yet the rate at which an avid follower of current events actually adds to his knowledge and understanding becomes smaller and smaller as ever more trivial chunks relative to the base he is adding to is soaked up. The tragedy here is that people who are imprisoned in this race to keep "up-to-date" on what they think are the "issues" increasingly miss out on opportunities to gain real groundbreaking insight.

There's just too much detail, too many people involved, and too many trails to follow. For every new factoid thrown out for the chattering classes to feed upon, ten new plots emerge. For every new plot, additional noise is added to the din.

Perhaps this is the reason why these sorts of things tend to coalesce around a person and his or her sordid story. Today, former state auditor Heidi Mendoza is that person. She is the icon of this latest of national "scandals" -- the person being fashioned into a modern-day Joan of Arc by the collective voice of a people always on the look out for the next "hero" to gallop in from the horizon.

Last time it was Jun Lozada and his entourage of nuns. Another time it was Jessica Alfaro, star witness extraordinaire.

Perhaps this need for a central character around whom noise barrages are organised and upon whom the burden of celebrity is foisted upon by a population of starstruck ignoramuses, helps simplify the vast complex of dysfunction that Filipinos had progressively amassed and subject themselves to over the last half-century of "independence".

I can't really be bothered to follow the daily minutiae of detail proliferating in monstrous numbers as to ultimately devalue themselves. I rely instead on Heidi Mendoza to make the issue simple. For the majority of Filipinos too lazy-minded to come to real terms with the immensity of corruption in the Philippine military Heidi Mendoza is a symbol of a nebulous "solution" in the same way Noynoy Aquino was a similarly nebulous solution to the perceived immensity of Arroyo-era corruption.

With solutions that everyone tacitly agrees is nebulous in nature, there is no need to understand the detail of how it is to be implemented.

Have Filipinos earned the right to be free?

2011-02-02T23:50:00.004+11:00

I believe in a human being's "inalienable right" to freedom. Every human deserves to be free -- that is, as an initial state. As the song goes, we are all born free. But from then on the evaluation begins. Indeed, one needs to be free to be be subject to this "evaluation", otherwise there is no basis for it.

For example, there was no basis for evaluating Filipinos' fitness to be free under the dictatorship of former President Ferdinand Marcos. That is because there was no opportunity to observe what Filipinos would make of said freedom. Now, 25 years since Filipinos "became free" in 1986 we have the benefit of that 25 years of hindsight to evaluate what Pinoys would do with their freedom.

And so now we can ask the question:

Have we earned the right to be "free"?

Believe it or not, freedom can be lost. We were free before Magellan discovered our sad islands. But because we lacked the ability to defend our freedom, we lost it and became a Spanish colony named after a Spanish Inquisition king. Then we again won "Independence" in 1898 and, in theory, "freedom" as an outcome. But just like in the 16th Century, we lacked the chops to keep it. And so we had again to content ourselves with being ruled by a foreign power. Then there was 1946, yay!, then 1972, boo hoo, then 1986, yay! -- and then a subsequent 25 years of imperceptible degeneration to what we are as a nation today.

The Truth about Filipinos' lack of savviness with regard to making freedom work for her is a poignant one -- not much different from the poignancy surrounding a lottery winner who ends up in the poor house a few months after collecting his winnings.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Branding the Philippines Part II: turning a commodity into a premium product

2011-01-31T18:00:00.005+11:00

Blogger Paul Farol recently brought to my attention an initiative to develop a "brand" for the Philippines. The initiative is being championed by a certain EON Philippines which, according to its website, is a "stakholders relations firm". EON have written a whitepaper, "Branding the Philippines: Championing the Filipino" that consolidates ideas brainstormed in a recently held forum that included representatives from various business stakholders in the Philippines (chambers of commerce, business clubs, industry associations, etc.).

The paper basically makes several recommendations around the branding approach to be taken...

* * *

(1) Focus on people.

Filipinos are the brand. The Filipino is the Philippines’ best asset which can compete with any value proposition of other countries.

(2) Highlight four key positive characteristics (the "4C's").

- Caring
- Creative
- Collaborative
- Colorful

(3) Identify the Filippino "essence".

- Relationship-oriented
- Values home
- Celebratory

* * *

... and suggests these be supported through an Executive Order creating a government body reporting to the President to (1) oversee establishment of the brand, (2) develop and implement branding strategy, and (3) form an organisational structure headed by the Secretary for Communications (Messaging) who will effect a "tripartite collaboration" approach to enlisting the participation of "private sector and civil society".

For the most part, Paul's insightful reaction to the paper (EON had opened the paper to public commentary) can be encapsulated in a simple expression

Lipstick on a pig does not change the fact of the pig.

Specifically:

In conclusion, by getting our acts together first, it will be easier to sell our country without having to spend so much on brand promotion that inevitably may just turn into so much fairy-dust once the shit-hits-the-fan (another bombing, another hostage crisis involving foreigners, another massacre, another natural disaster, another slew of foreign investments deterred by 'protectionist' policies, etcetera).

This echoes an earlier piece of mine where I cited the Inquirer.net Editor's view on our efforts to brand ourselves as an el primo tourist destination:

To get the wow, one has to earn the wow [alluding to the successful "Wow Philippines" tourism slogan that the Department of Tourism (DOT) under the current administration tried and failed to replace]. In that sense, the DOT has a lot more to do than merely change its slogan or, for that matter, offering up a new website.

Generally speaking, the DOT needs to do a much better job with its maintenance of various crumbling tourist spots and protection of the country’s natural treasures. Maybe if the DOT were already doing those things well, people wouldn’t mind the bizarre new slogan [whose release led to the downfall of former Tourism Secretary Vicente Romano], no matter how wayward it is.

A comment I made on Paul's article dared beg to differ slightly with the view that shaping up necessarily precedes the showcasing. There are, after all, cases where shrewd brand marketing did manage to get people to focus on the lipstick and ignore the pig behind it. An example of this is the way cigarettes are marketed.

But I offer a slightly more positive flavour of this angle -- one that capitalises on what is real:

If we just have to come up with a "brand", we don't need all those characters that what's-his-face branding consultant recommends we engage. Their approach sounds like some kind of perverse management-by-committee on steroids (with the proportionate price tag attached!).

There's this ProPinoy.net article that is partially spot on and the insight is right on its title "Finding Your Niche", where I submitted this comment:
What's our biggest export? People. What is our most valuable industrial input? Labour-added-value.

In short, our niche is people and labour.

The challenge is to UPGRADE these into premium offerings to the market from the current low-grade commodity prices these command.

Identify the key success factor to meeting that challenge, and THAT then becomes our brand.

In a sense, an alternative analogy to the cigarette marketing example that could be applied here is water. Water is in essence a dirt cheap commodity and, for some, virtually free. And yet, some bozo came up with what would go on to become an immensely profitable idea: why not bottle it and sell it for a hundred times its value pound-for-pound!

Business Sense 101 at its best.

Noynoy Aquino: Filipino of the Year for 2010

2011-01-30T17:14:00.004+11:00

The Inquirer today crowned President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III "our Filipino of the Year". This honour was bestowed on the incumbent Philippine president supposedly for being "the living Filipino who made the most positive impact in 2010". And, it seems, on the basis of a November 2010 Social Weather Station survey that showed "seven out of 10 Filipinos were satisfied with President Aquino’s administration" and on a Pulse Asia "trust rating" of 80 percent.

Now the "biggest rock star of the moment", according to the Inquirer, Noynoy supposedly "endeared himself to the masses by implementing quickly doable reforms that they could instantly appreciate" -- things like the banning of the "wang-wang" and stopping "the practice of politicians stamping government projects with their names".

The Inquirer went on to convince its readers why Noynoy is "bigger" than singer Arnel Pineda and possessing of "parallels" with boxer Manny Pacquiao. For one thing, Arnel "could never have secured the $434-million Millennium Challenge Corporation grant from the government of yet another rock star of this generation, US President Barack Obama". Oh no sirrrreee. Of course not. Furthermore, the Inquirer insists that there are "some parallels, too, between Pacquiao’s and Aquino’s manner of acquiring the [Filipino of the Year] title for which this paper’s editors vote annually". Indeed, get this: "Pacquiao won boxing matches that were “heavily watched” worldwide. Aquino won the arguably most closely watched—and not only locally—Philippine presidential election".

So Mr Aquino, we congratulate and salute you, Chief. Only a guy like you could bomb on your first State of the Nantion Address, botch a public-relations management challenge in the aftermath of a tragic hostage situation that resulted in the deaths of eight Hong Kong nationals, and overall preside over a period that saw the peace and order situation in the country degenerate significantly and then walk away with a distinction earned on the dubious claim that you made a significant "positive impact" on the country.

Of course it helps that the "survey firms" that provided some basis for this "achievement" of yours are owned by members of your extended family, and the awarding body itself once served (and by most accounts still serves) as the Aquinos' campaign newsletter.

But then this is the Philippines -- where the National "Debate" is one where "all the wrong arguments prevail" and where "[l]ogic and common sense take the backseat to political arguments and the views of the poorly-educated".

Science vs Religion: an incomplete victory

2011-01-29T21:08:00.004+11:00

Shocking revelation: In the United States, only 28 percent of teachers taught evolution "effectively", and that 13 percent of them advocated creationism. Unfortunate, considering that a US court had already previously held that the concept of "intelligent design" is not a science. In the landmark Kitzmiller v. Dover case, eleven parents sued a public school board in Pennsylvania for a policy that legitimised intelligent design and creationism. The outcome of the case was a triumph for science and a "defeat[...] of creationism in the courtroom"...

Local citizens wanted their religious values validated by the science curriculum; prominent academics testified to the scientific consensus on evolution; and creationists lost decisively. Intelligent design was not science, held the court, but rather an effort to advance a religious view via public schools, a violation of the U.S. Constitution's Establishment Clause. Many scientists cheered the decision, agreeing with the court that the school board displayed “breathtaking inanity”.

... but not in the classroom. The victory it seems now was "premature" and "incomplete", as the Scientific American article noted, even those US teachers who didn't hold strong beliefs in either side of the debate dithered...

The roughly 60 percent in the mushy middle steered around conflicts between evolution and creationism or taught both and let students draw their own conclusions. (Always such a good idea….)

The survey’s crucial insight was that how teachers taught depended far more on [...] their personal beliefs than on the community curriculum standards that have been the focus of battleground court cases, such as Kitzmiller v. Dover from five years ago.

And this is in America, the developed world's wealthiest and mightiest nation.

Perhaps I was lucky. I studied in a Catholic school and, as a high school sophomore there, was ironically educated about evolution and Darwinism by a brilliant balikbayan graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The fundamental theory of natural selection that underpins the concept of evolution is so elegantly simple yet it so comprehensively and robustly explains how complex life forms came to inhabit our planet. So simple and elegant it is, that we fail to imagine how groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting it was the first time Charles Darwin started connecting the dots in the mid-1800s.

This exceptional insight that Darwin contributed to human knowledge not only survived more than a century and a half but thrives even today in the 21st Century. Darwinian ideas underlie the terms that describe the dynamics of how information propagates itself over that uniquely 21st Century landscape -- social media. Terms like "going viral", "memes", and "memetic" are tacitly understood by the modern mind because of the contextual pillars provided by the theory of natural selection.

As we face an unprecedented opportunity to re-evaluate our legal framework and focus on reforms, perhaps there is a lesson to be applied from the experience of similarly reform-minded people in America. We need to make sure that any battle fought be in the context of a mission that describes a complete victory.

Kicking the US out of our shores - a 20-year lesson for Filipinos

2011-01-28T11:24:00.007+11:00

The United States is reportedly taking steps to help beef up the Philippines' "maritime capacity". Southeast Asia is of strategic importance to the United States and the Philippines is the weakest link of the zone. Its long coastline and dense jungle of islands coupled with a flaccid armed forces make the Philippines a blight in a vital junction of shipping lanes -- a potential haven for pirates, transshipment point for arms and illegal drugs, and base for international terrorism.

The pledge came from US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell on the first day of an inaugural security dialogue between the two allies.

"One of the subjects for discussions tomorrow will be the bilateral steps that (we) can take to increase the Philippines' maritime capacity," Campbell said.

This would enhance the Philippine navy's capacity to police its waters, he told a joint news conference.

"We think this is a critical component of our partnership. Much of this work is already underway and we seek to intensify it in the months and years ahead," he said without giving details.

Recall that in 1992, Filipinos pompously closed doors on any hope of extending America's further use of the Philippines as a base for its key military assets in the Pacific. Removal of US bases in the Philippines was a flagship "promise" of Cory Aquino in her successful campaign and "revolution" that saw her ascent to the Philippine Presidency in 1986; a promise which she broke in 1991 when she started a campaign to have the lease agreement between the US and the Philippines extended.

Unfortunately, a bar against further American military presence in the Philippines was by then enshrined in Cory Aquino's ironic 1987 Constitution. Furthermore, Filipinos' renowned perverse sense of "nationalism" won over the Philippine Senate whose members at the time voted 12 to 11 to reject any further evaluation of the possibility of extending American military presence in the country over a significant period. This is a testament to the destructive power of popularity-fueled political momentum that steamrollers over sober and detached critical thinking that is securely tethered to what is real.

Some estimates put the economic contribution of the US presence in the Philippines at $1 billion annually -- encompassing local employment of Filipinos, contracts with Filipino businesses, economic aid, and other indirect economic benefits that trickled into the rest of the country.

More importantly, American bases in the Philippines gave Filipinos a profile in global politics that we could never have built nor will most likely ever build on our own flaccid merits. As I wrote in my piece "American influence gives Pinoys a place in global geopolitics":

America’s influence fills a vacuum that exists in the intellectual landscape of Philippine society much the same way as another legacy of American presence — the jeepney — fills a void in our country’s mass transport capability.

We as a people lack a cohesive agenda and vision that is bigger than the petty politics that frames our politicians’ posturings. Here then is what is real: Whether we like it or not, American influence gives us a place (pathetic as it may be) in global geopolitics. It is a choice between that and the laughable small-mindedness of Pinoy thinking that will determine and govern that place.

And even more realistically;

If America withdraws its influence on Philippine internal affairs, some other global power will simply step in to fill the void.

A testament to this is the sorry record of attempts of Filipinos to build upon the infrastructural wonders left behind by the Americans at its biggest facilities in Subic Bay in Zambales and Clark in Pampanga. Indeed, as I wrote in yet another piece "We can still be friends"...

there is no shortage of reminders on the extent by which our faculties for exercising a bit of imagination remain utterly stunted. This trait of ours in conjunction with, our renowned heritage of smallness, our focus on the droll, trivial, and irrelevant, and our insularity, i.e., ...
[...] narrowly restricted in outlook or scope; being provincial, being narrow in scope, or considering only small sections of an issue; narrow-minded

... go a long loooooong way in explaining why we are so utterly inept at sustainably turning resources served up to us on a silver platter into reliable streams of recurring income. Consider that the latter phrase describes the cornerstone concept of the definition of the business enterprise.

In our pathetic 100% reliance on all things foreign and 0.0000001% reliance on inherent capability (because there is none); the lack of that substance that would have routinely cushioned a crash in any number of these periodic financial collapses, simply means that our implosion as a society and as an economy sees no bottom (specially when seen in the context of the embarassing 2.3% p.a. clip at which we multiply).

Thanks to the 12 bozos who voted against US military bases in the Philippines in 1991 -- Senate President Jovito Salonga, Sens. Wigberto Tanada, Teofisto Guingona, Rene Saguisag, Victor Ziga, Sotero Laurel, Ernesto Maceda, Agapito Aquino, Juan Ponce Enrile, Joseph Estrada, Orlando Mercado, and Aquilino Pimentel -- Filipinos have, right in their faces today, a sad lesson twenty years in the making in what it is like to languish outside the American sphere of what is globally relevant.

Filipinos cannot do it alone. We have proven it time and again. This is evident in how we now pathetically scrounge around for (1) foreign capital (to the point of looking seriously into throwing our doors fully open to it) and (2) political favour with America, China, and/or whatever global power will rescue us from our pathetic insignificance in the global scheme of things.

Change from within: how science and celebrity can effect it

2011-01-27T06:58:00.004+11:00

It has often been highlighted that to get on a sustainable course towards prosperity, Filipinos need not a change of men but a change in men. It is a social transformation that needs to come from within. An article in Scientific American provides insight on how lessons learned from the success of some past initiatives that aimed to transform thinking in people and shape their regard for what were once deeply-ingrained beliefs and mindsets could be re-applied today.

In "Behavior Frontiers: Can Social Science Combat Climate Change?", researchers are looking to "remove some of the guesswork about how individuals will use energy in 2050 by looking at past campaigns to induce personal change and their effectiveness".

By studying past instances of social transformation, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) hope to predict future change in response to global warming as part of California’s Carbon Challenge—a study commissioned by the California Energy Commission to help the state cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels.

Lessons from how smoking was successfully turned from cool to uncool over the last several decades, and how a campaign to encourage the use of seat belts succeeded at strengthening laws to enforce their use might, in theory, be applicable to inducing change in critical human activities today where opportunities to reduce energy consumption abound.

For example, tobacco smoking has been in a steady decline since the 1960s with all sorts of factors driving this trend—improved science and epidemiology, education through labeling and advertising campaigns, and greater public awareness of risks—all of which could be applied to behaviors that contribute to climate change. "Watershed events and labeling can play important roles in transforming change. The 1964 Surgeon General report is an example [of a watershed event] and subsequent labeling for cigarettes was a big factor," says energy researcher Max Wei of LBNL, adding that he imagines far more carbon or environmental labeling to inform the public.

By identifying the hurdles, policies and incentives used to, say, dissuade smokers from lighting up, the LBNL team says they can better pinpoint corresponding elements related to persuading individuals to alter their energy use.

Thus for the purposes of reducing energy consumption and, consequently, Americans' carbon footprint, things like eating less meat, switching off unused lights, setting the thermostat to warmer temperatures in summer and lower temperatures in winter, among others, represent the next frontier of behavioural change campaigns.

Energy use coming from a runaway First World lifestyle happens to be the most relevant macro change imperative for Americans. For Filipinos the macro imperative is more basic -- alleviating poverty and invigorating the economy.

For Filipinos, perhaps, a similar approach can be applied to developing programs and campaigns to change readily-apparent dysfunctional behaviours that contribute to the chronic poverty that our country is renowned for. Low savings rates, weak propensity to invest, consumerism, runaway reproduction, fiesta mentality, lack of imagination, atrophied sense of personal accountability, indifference to rules, and an inability to honour commitments among others collectively form a complex of character traits that predispose Filipinos to muddle along in that familiar mediocrity we have collectively become comfy with.

It is interesting to note that there is no one specific political solution that will address the roadblocks to prosperity presented by our dysfunctional culture. The solution lies in a sustained campaign to push a people who are driven primarily by a sense of hiya (shame), and not by any higher or nobler collective purpose. By progressively stigmatising these Filipino mindsets and character traits change can be effected from within. It is up to the influential among us -- celebrities and opinion shapers -- to effect this campaign by sending out the right messages and serving as role models to the people who take their cue from them.

Philippine crime wave: built upon an institutionalised criminal infrastructure!

2011-01-26T11:48:00.005+11:00

The last several weeks had seen many high profile crimes make headline news, tweeted and re-tweeted on Twitter. From thence the characteristic teeth gnashing and talking-out-loud public introspection that modern "social media" had all but commoditised today pervades the national chatter. Much of the perception that we are now leading dangerous lives in a crime-gripped society runs counter to statistical data pointing to an actual reduction in the country's crime rate. However, as the Inquirer.net Editor himself observed, it's not facts, but perceptions that drive action...

The police top brass can protest until they are blue in the face that the incidence of crime is going down and that the peace and order situation is normal, but the ordinary citizen knows that crime is on a rampage in the streets of many towns and cities.

The daily reports in the media tell the real story: high-profile as well as minor crimes are striking fear into the hearts of people. They no longer feel safe traveling in the streets or even staying in their homes, as witness the case of a woman who was killed when she opened in her sala a supposed "gift" that contained a grenade.

As Mr Editor pointed out "reports in the media tell the real story".

When something is given Media bandwidth, it becomes the "real" story.

This is not to diminish the value of the outrage that the events that transpired over the last several weeks deserve. The brazenness of these acts of violence are an affront to civility and decency. But most crimes have a thicker plot. And these recent ones are not exempt.

Perhaps, consider then the murder of car dealers in Manila, the gunning down of a journalist in Palawan, the bombing of buses in Manila and Cotabato, and the routine snatching of mobile phones from their hapless owners in broad daylight. They make headline news which then get tongues wagging and tweets flying among the chattering classes. Not surprisingly we de facto "officially" now have a "crime wave" gripping the nation.

In considering these sensational crimes, we seem to forget the underlying criminal infrastructure that had for the longest time simmered beneath the surface that is our society's popular consciousness.

Members of "civil society" routinely patronise goods traded by criminals

Snatched mobile phones and carjacking are merely the harvesting activities of what is a vast underground trade in contraband and stolen goods that spans the Philippine archipelago. Indeed, "underground" is a misleading word here, as most of these goods are retailed in broad daylight. Patrons of these goods are, in fact, likely to be the same people we hobnob with in "polite" society in the sterilised "cafes" of Makati everyday.

We live our comfy lives in the midst of mansions built by criminal activity and share the road with cars souped up with chop-chopped parts bought in Quezon City. Today, the spotlight is now upon the victims of this banal criminality that our own lives are interwoven into, and indignation is directed towards the perpetrators of these one-time incidents. But there is still a hard question we need to answer: Are we prepared to own up to our own complicity in the less-sensational criminal infrastructure that underlies these violent crimes?

Terrorism is a dirty word

President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III had earlier dismissed as "not based on firm intelligence" travel advisories coming from the US, Australian, British, Canadian, French and New Zealand governments stating that terrorist attacks were likely in the Philippines. So the President's words in the "statement" he issued right after the 25th January EDSA bus bombing to me kind of ring hollow (translated to English from what was a primarily Tagalog-worded statement):

In line with all this, the PNP and AFP intelligence services have been directed to review all threat assessments "with the end in view of hardening all of the areas that are considered under threat". Efforts have been on-going even before this incident such as the taking stock of all AFP and PNP equipment, specially considering incidents that involved the use of C4. Control over these consumables is being tightened.

Recall that the fall of the Roman Empire was preceded by a short period when barbarian hordes nipped at its frontiers while Rome itself partied and oohed and aahed its cultural magnificence.

So whereas we would all like to think that criminality is -- horrors! -- in bed with our police forces and politicians and everyone else who are not us, it seems that this is an incomplete truth that we have latched on to. The complete truth is something less palatable -- and it points to the very people who, today, are most vocal about being afraid of what their own fixation on consumerism, keeping-up-with-the-jones's, and "ja-porms" has wrought, as well as their renewed unease with which they now regard the fragile peace upon which we had built the veneer of civility and cultural sophistication of our premier population, commercial, and cultural centres.

It is perhaps a simple case of us currently being victims of a weak national government that now emboldens some to test what was once an uneasy peace our society enjoys with banal criminality.

Philippine reform agenda - stay focused on the mission

2011-01-25T00:35:00.006+11:00

The mission is quite straightforward -- alleviate poverty, invigorate the economy, and make both outcomes sustainable. There is not much in the way of alternatives to consider as far as the mission goes. But as far as actions go, there are many alternatives and many ways of combining these alternatives. Perhaps the one gathering momentum is the way to go. But to remain focused on the mission necessitates continued openness to evaluating alternatives even as we proceed with the popular option. That way the public remains better engaged.

As such, some assumptions underpinning the Constitutional Reform agenda still stand out as debatable. Perhaps the increasing debatability of these assumptions is symptomatic of a more disturbing fixation on pre-conceived solutions. So here I offer some thoughts around the key assumptions I have found so far.

Comparing the prosperity of West Germany and South Korea to the impoverishment of East Germany and North Korea respectively as a case for changing forms of governance and restrictions on access to foreign capital

What is being evaluated in the Philippines today as we move into a critical evaluation of the proposed changes to the Constitution is a choice between two flavours of democracy and not two diametrically opposed systems of governance. Indeed, the former East Germany and North Korea happened and happen to be two of the most repressive states -- repressive even amongst fellow communist states. To use a comparison of these two states to their counterpart free market democratic sister states to illustrate how a shift from one flavour of democracy to another can make a massive difference simply does not make sense.

Assuming that the way high quality leadership successfully impacted the success of its constituents in one society will necessarily be the case in another.

Singapore is held up as an example of how high quality -- and often autocratic leadership -- largely accounted for the successful rise of this country from Third to First World status. Therefore, we'd like to think that it follows that if we have better leaders, Filipinos will also have a better shot at becoming a prosperous people. This was, in fact, the very fundamental basis of the "hope" that fueled the first Edsa "People Power" "revolution". The thinking at that time was that the "evil" of then President Ferdinand Marcos was the cause of Filipinos' wretchedness and that the "goodness" of a democratically-elected President will pave the way to a prosperous future for all. Thus, "freedom" came to be considered the substantiation of that "hope" for a better future that defined 1980's thinking; i.e.,

Once the Filipino has freedom, prosperity will follow.

This was an assertion that was strongly believed at the time and, to be fair, came across as perfectly logical to 1980's Filipino minds. Indeed, replace "free" in the above assertion with any number of terms that define today's initiatives...

"unfettered access to foreign capital"
"a Parliamentary form of government"
"freedom from corruption"

etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseum de cacao

... and we get the same "perfect logic" that supposedly underpins the big and only "sensible" projects of the second decade of the 21st Century.

But then look back for a moment: 1986 came and went. The Philippines changed from a dictatorship into a rambunctious democracy. Filipinos have been "free" for the last 25 years. And the question remains:

Where are the results?

Expecting big outcomes from a relatively small change

Fact is, changing from a dictatorship to a modern democracy is an immense leap -- close to the fact of how different North Korea is to South Korea -- or East Germany to West Germany back in the Cold War. The action in 1986 effected a change in governance as big as the difference between the pairs of sister states cited previously. Trouble is, the subsequent results are almost negligible in the Philippines.

The job of fixing the country and the business of getting rich, if we are to believe those spruiking some of today's reform proposals, can only truly begin under a parliamentary system and a regime of unrestricted access to foreign capital. But is the change -- from one form of democracy to another and from a more-than-semi-free market to a totally free one -- as paradigm-shifting as that of what happened in 1986? If not, will the changes proposed today live up to as astounding an expectation as a Philippines that is convincingly going down the road to prosperity?

Assuming that the outcome of governance change in one society will be the same as the outcomes of a similar governance change in the Philippines.

Perhaps there is good reason to believe that the Philippines will prosper this time after these initiatives push through. But to look to other cultures and fail to consider that Chinese, Koreans, and Germans represent a cultural makeup vastly different from ours -- from Filipinos' -- places significant doubt on the whole idea of mounting a concerted go-for-broke overhaul in governance, when there are alternative more conservatively-phased approaches to effect the same proposed changes with considerably less disruption...

The Philippines has already amended the Constitution singly in the past: when Congress was changed from a unicameral to a bicameral assembly; and when Parity was passed to allow foreigners to own property in the Philippines. We’ve done it before, we can do it again. Best of all, it would be cheaper. Congress can discuss and pass the proposed amendment during its regular session and submit it to the people for ratification at the same time as the regular elections. The same thing can be done for other amendments.

The guiding principle here is quite simple:

DO make the actions a function of the mission; and,
DON'T make the mission a function of the actions.

Time and again we've seen missions de-scoped as the momentum of initiatives originally conceived to accomplish these remained even as any evidence of effectiveness became farther in between. An example of this is the "Truth Commission" initiative of President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III. The Truth Commission initiative was conceived to accomplish the mission of taking people to account for certain "crimes". But then the initiative faltered. Noynoy and his team -- for so long fixated on a single initiative -- was left with no alternatives; no Plan B. As a result they then turned what was once a noble exercise into a pathetic finger-pointing circus, blaming an "uncooperative" Judiciary, and into an effort to downgrade public expectations of the mission being accomplished any time soon.

Moral of the story: There is no my way or the highway in any modern approach to change. Make the mission the absolute and the initiatives the variables. Initiatives are necessarily negotiable and therefore alternatives should never be ruled out, much less debate surrounding these summarily dismissed.

Real-world personal relationships severely limit a blogger's artistic license

2011-01-24T11:24:00.016+11:00

The Philippine blogosphere tends to buzz a lot about stuff that has to do with blogging. That's quite natural. Car enthusiasts talk about cars, sports fans talk about sport, and bloggers talk about blogging. The thing with this of course is that non-bloggers (more so those outside even its outer circle of Twitterers and other "social media" aficionados) cannot relate. This collective navel-gazing that the Pinoy blogging community gets into every now and then seems, therefore, to yield no real social value beyond, hopefully, an inward reflection that might result in some self-policing and, even more hopefully, some positive outcomes.

One of the controversies making the rounds in the Philippine blogging community lately is the whole issue around high-profile bloggers supposedly being in bed with "evil" public relations (PR) firms. It started with an anecdotal exposé of the uncool practice of some bloggers pimping themselves to PR firms or allowing a gravy train of vested interests to determine their content...

The (PR) Firm approached [Filipino restaurateur] Georgia, telling her that she could increase her sales by three if she hired them. Georgia gently declined, saying that she had been lucky in receiving good reviews from the press. “But we can also help you through social media,” The Firm’s representative said. “We call this service ‘buzz creation’ or word-of-mouth generation,” the rep explained.

The Firm said that if hired for this service, they would invite bloggers to eat at Georgia’s restaurant and blog rave reviews. They would also create a restaurant Facebook page and make sure that a significant number would “Like” the resto’s page. When the resto would be featured in a blog, they would make sure that there are positive comments on that post.

The reality of a blogger (or for that matter any person who publishes content for public consumption) living in the real world and blogging at the same time and mashing together one's identity as a blogger with real-life interaction is that said blogger loses objectivity; specifically:

* * *

(1) With every new real-life personal relationship formed, a new no-go-zone of ideas is added to a blogger's imagination.

When we make friends or exchange favours or "goodwill", say, with a Catholic zealot, we lose some ability to write about stuff that die-hard Catholics may take offense to -- like Reproductive Health, for instance. Make friends and form "alliances" with politicians who, of course, have their respective agendas, and we start to routinely think twice about whether what we are about to write might slight one over-inflated ego or another.

(2) Bloggers get enmeshed in a time-consuming Web of personal relationships and "alliances" interwoven intricately with their blogging work.

Relationships require time and effort to maintain and nurture. Consider then that coming out with insightful and original material invokes a certain skill set while remaining married to one's spouse and friends with one's friends requires another. Bloggers who mash together blogging and real-life friendships run the risk of potentially convoluting their work. We become trapped in massaging egos and managing relationships that might be impacted by the content we publish rather than focusing on the validity and quality of the content itself and taking on-board feedback coming from disembodied digital voices.

(3) One loses his or her outsider's perspective.

This is something I expounded upon in my seminal article about Establishment Bloggers.

For real bloggers, reward is inherent to the actual work itself...

Blogging is rewarding because of the prospect of one’s emergent prevalence and endurance in what is essentially a massive free-for-all for memetic dominance. It’s essentially not the sort of environment crybabies survive in.

You can see it in the difference between, say, the artistry of independent cinema and the crass commercialism of the blockbuster feature -- or, say, how the original Star Wars film (Episode IV) single handedly added far more to humanity's cultural capital than the contributions of all three latter-day sequels (Episodes I through III) combined despite the latters' box office successes.

* * *

According to the twit of the eminent Dean Jorge Bocobo presumably twittering as "SagadaSun":

Commercial Journalists and Entertainers are PAID to do a job. Bloggers generally are not. THAT's the basic difference.

... which, as I recall, was what bloggers originally tended to see as their selling point in the on-going competition for eyeballs between Mainstream Media and our lot. Sadly, this line originally drawn between (a) real blogging and (b) real-life relationships and real-world money is being blurred as many bloggers become too caught up with being well-liked and popular -- a quality they seem to be confusing with relevance and insight.

This is where Get Real Philippines (GRP) and its network of bloggers categorically differentiates itself from the rest of the on-line commodity rabble. After ten years of publishing cutting edge on-line content, GRP remains unmatched in thought leadership, unmatched in originality and UNMATCHED in the depth and breadth of real insight. That is because our relationship with the real world is limited, our focus on ideas is paramount, and, therefore, our interests rarely conflict with the people and events we observe at an arm's length.

Rely on the GRP Network, keep your eye on the ball, and don't lose the plot! Real rockers focus on being objectionable rather than well-liked.

Cleaning house before laying out the welcome mat: being cluey about foreign capital

2011-01-23T19:21:00.002+11:00

One of the key aspects of the Constitutional Reform agenda revolves around the proposal to open the Philippines to full foreign ownership of business assets and private property. It is a worthwhile option to explore as it has been known for quite some time how inept Filipinos are with creating capital indigenously and at keeping a productive chunk of it within its borders. Nonetheless, there is still a need to remain vigilant as to the nature of the capital we allow Filipinos unfettered access to, specifically: We want capital coming in that expands capacity for sustained gains in productivity and equity creation.

The priority at the moment is the immediate need to alleviate the wretched lives of millions of impoverished Filipinos. This provides a strong case for a free-for-all fire sale of domestic assets and business franchises to foreign capitalists. The thinking there is that jobs will be created and consumption stimulated, as soon as (1) a fresh wind of business ventures blows through, (2) formerly idle land and property get snapped up and used productively, and (3) increased competition puts downward pressure on prices as more options are made available to Filipinos.

No argument there. Increased consumption as a result of more options, more competition and therefore reduced costs provide short-term job creation and cost-of-living mitigation. But in looking out for the longer-term sustainability of economic growth, measures need to be seriously considered to ensure that a good chunk of the aggregate freed-up cash resulting from consumers benefiting from lower prices (and gaining more employment) gets re-channeled into investment (or back into the financial system) rather than get pissed away on non-added-value consumption (e.g. celphone trinkets, beer, mistresses and motels, borloloy on onher-type jeeps, etc.)

In short there needs to be either or both (1) an increase in savings rate and (2) increased predisposition to invest. In either case, free cash is conserved (capitalised) instead of pissed away (expensed). At the very least, depositing cash in a savings account, puts that cash in circulation in the financial system which, in principle, is most efficient at channelling it to who needs it the most in the industrial community. But spend that cash on celphone load, and what could've been capitalised dissolves into digital oblivion in a single conversation with one's girlfriend.

Get that ethic rolling, and dependence on foreign capital gets steadily petered down over the years as domestic capital (and the capacity to create it indigenously) ramps up.

Further relaxing restrictions to foreign capital is therefore not the silver bullet that will see us instantly enjoying a bonanza of jobs and bustling commerce and trade. There are many challenges ahead, and as such, we need to be careful about not getting into a complacent if-you-open-it-they-will-enter appeal. Indeed, as I stated in my article "Throwing our doors open to foreign investment when we can't even get tourists to visit":

If your house looks and smells like shit, even burglars won't enter it.

And it is a bit of a no-brainer to behold the way the Philippines assaults the senses of a would-be investor the way a neglected public crapper does. Manila's international airport and its immediate surroundings, for one, provides very revealing first impressions. But there are many other subtle things about Filipinos that begin to hit the sensibilities of the average business explorer as he gets to know the society. Rules are recommendations, yes means no (and vice versa), being on time is to be grossly un-Filipino, and words without contracts are for the most part empty. To the Western industrialist who considers one's word and handshake golden, and to a Japanese executive who comes from a society where "there are very few lawyers and the codes are mostly unwritten, but [...] are binding, nonetheless" (Greg Sheridan, Asian Values, Western Dreams), the Filipino Way can come across as infuriating.

In short:

We need to clean our house first before we throw open our doors and lay out the Welcome mat.

As we can see, all roads lead back to the way Da Pinoy mind is wired. Indeed, Constitutional Reform can either be the overarching program to facilitate change in our sad society or a key pillar in an even more broadly encompassing change program defined by a handful of Vital Few Initiatives. The important thing is to stay focused on the whole point of these exercises by tethering ourselves to it, even as we get deep into the detail of the actions we mount -- and remain cognisant of the Truth about Filipinos: that our society in the form it takes today is a massive outcome of too many actions underpinned by very little thinking.

Throwing our doors open to foreign investment when we can't even get tourists to visit

2011-01-21T11:26:00.007+11:00

Everytime I walk by the local Flight Centre (an airline ticket booking chain that offers McDonalds-like travel agency services) in the city, I note the posters and fliers displaying sweetened holiday deals to various Southeast Asian cities beckoning Aussies shopping for their next overseas getaway "adventure". You can't help but notice the ridiculously low fares to "exotic" cities like Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and even Phnom Penh - a city just fresh out of the Stone Age. With the Aussie Dollar flying above the rest of the developed world's deppressed currencies, and winter fast approaching in the southern hemisphere, our credit cards are locked and loaded.

Where is Manila in Flight Centre's strategic marketing scheme of things? I don't know. I don't work there. But just on the basis of the Philippine capital's consistent absence in Australian travel marketing paraphernalia over the last ten years, one can tell this teeming megalopolis of more than 11 million is a non-entity here -- not even an afterthought.

The Philippines' doors to travellers awash with cash and wide-eyed for "adventure" are not only wide-open, they are practically begging to be entered. Yet tourist arrival figures in the Philippines are utterly dwarfed by those of Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. In the wake of the global financial meltdown of 2008, tourism was seen as the industry of last resort (no pun intended) as the remittances of our army of overseas foreign workers (OFWs) came to be seen as being under threat.

I wrote at the time how our entire way of life at its very core simply did not exhibit any serious alignment with our aspirations in that much-touted industry of "hope"...

[...] considering that Filipinos have for the last several decades systematically destroyed the very natural wonders it now desperately hawks to anyone out there with foreign exchange to spare for leisure.
Indeed, evidence of Filipino habitation is next-to-impossible to ignore in these named-after-a-Spanish-king islands. No less than 3.4 million hectares of forest cover has disappeared from 1990 to 2005. Primary forest cover now accounts for just 2.8% of total land area in these islands. Add to that the human excrement we regularly dump into our rivers and stormwater drains. Years ago, I took a helicopter flight over Manila and the thing I remember the most is looking down upon the port area of Manila Bay and seeing a huge blot of black water at the mouth of the Pasig River contrasting sharply with the green-bluish water further out to sea.

That's "just" our forests and our water supply. But it reflects our society's regard and respect for the land we inhabit and now rely on desperately for our future survival as part of the global economy in the face of this "crisis". It makes the pitch of the "natural wonders" of our land that dominates our tourist brochures sound rather phoney and utterly out-of-sync with our collective character.

Seriously, our tourist industry is a shell of glossy false advertising.

Questioning the if-you-open-it-they-will-enter notion we apply to foreign direct investment (FDI)

If your house looks and smells like shit, even burglars won't enter it.

Even as Western Europe and North America lurch painfully into the New Year under the weight of highly-leveraged non-performing assets, Southeast Asia is sucking up the world's capital like a sponge -- except the Philippines. BusinessWorld Online, in fact, reports that investors are bypassing the Philippines...

FDI flows into Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore in 2010 were estimated to have surged by triple-digit rates from yearago levels as Southeast Asia was among the regions that led the global economic recovery, the UN Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said in its Global Investment Trends Monitor.

Malaysia was projected to have grown its FDI by 410% to $7 billion while Indonesia similarly enjoyed a 163% rise to $12.8 billion, the UN agency said, annualizing available data for the three quarters of 2010.

Singapore, meanwhile, likely saw FDI levels grow by 123% to 16.8 billion.

These improvements allowed inflows to South, East and Southeast Asia to rise by 17.8% to $274.6 billion while the global average flattened to $1.122 trillion in the same year, the UNCTAD said.

Full-year estimates for the Philippines were not included in the report but the country, according to latest central bank data, recorded an annual 36.5% decline in FDI as of October.

Like the tourist industry, with its wide open doors and meagre arrivals the question we need to ask is whether overly restrictive regulation of foreign ownership of Philippine business assets -- specifically the 60/40 foreign/local ownership rules -- is the primary issue at work here. In that BusinessWorld Online report, the only excuses reported for our pathetic performance in attracting FDIs were around infrastructure deficiency...

Long-proposed moves to improve infrastructure have just started, European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines Executive Director Henry J. Schumacher said in a text message.

... and disruptions caused by our political circuses...

The disparity was likely caused by last year’s elections, University of the Philippines economist Benjamin C. Diokno said in a text message yesterday.

"Investors adopted a wait-and-see attitude given the change in political leadership," Mr. Diokno said.

...that is, of course, if "expert" opinion can even be trusted nowadays.

Note however how access to foreign capital was not mentioned at all. It raises the embarrassing possibility that even with doors thrown open to full foreign ownership and a "Buy us, PLEASE!" sign displayed, we will still be bypassed by the industrialists of the world.

Of course, cash not flowing into the country is not something any of us would like to see. But consider how OFW cash currently flows into the economy to the tune of more than 10% of its value. The really hard question with regard to this embarrassingly large elephant in the room is quite simple:

Where has all that cash been used?

The OFW remittances black hole illustrates how Filipinos remain clueless about the productive and sustainable use of money. A number of issues could be at work there -- lack of skills, lack of attitude, lack of imagination, lack of information, lack of infrastructure, whatever. The point is, in the case of this consistently moronic use of otherwise abundant cash, access to it certainly is not an issue.

Multiply the possibility of that sort of misrepresentation of what really is the fundamental problem behind our chronic inability to prosper as a people, and we begin to worry about whether we truly understand what we want to get out of certain initiatives being pushed, the advocacies being organised around them, and the momentum these are gathering.

In the case of our tourist industry, it was momentum that ultimately did in Enteng Romano and his ill-fated "Pilipinas Kay Ganda" sloganeering project. The volumes of action and the very little thinking that underpinned them is quite easy to see in hindsight there. At least that time, only a few odd-millions pesos and a bit of face was lost.

The Philippines' Vital Few initiatives

2011-01-20T17:14:00.008+11:00

The Philippines is a most massive outcome of lots of actions underpinned by very little thinking. So many initiatives, advocacies, "movements", agendas, and vested interests driven by even more characters in a country of 100 million clueless people -- it sounds like a chapter out of John Barrow's seminal book Impossibility. The Philippines is a case study in Impossibility. But it is only so because we barrel down slippery slopes without a lifeline to a basic plot. The vital few is a management concept that we can, perhaps, apply as we face the next six years as a way to keep our bearings even as we slog through the complex of petty politics and the din of chatter in our pursuit of clarity of purpose. Here are what I think the three vital few issues that define Filipinos' aspirations.

* * *

Population and environmental impact

Every new Filipino person born will require space, food, fuel, and public funds to develop into a productive citizen. He or she will also require parents -- a resource essential to upbringing that is in short supply as well as employment overseas -- and absentee parenting -- is becoming more of a rule than an exception in our capital-deficited society.

We consume and depend on consumption to sustain the economy, yet our ability to produce and create is being atrophied by easy access to imported trinkets, imported food, and even imported capital. Increasing consumption without a commensurate increase in domestic capacity to both produce and create capital is a slow and imperceptible gradual imprisonment within a complex of dependency and a progressive erosion of self-sufficiency, independence, and reduction of ability to be on top of our future.

Poverty in light of this barreling down the slippery slope of wanton reproduction, consumption, and mounting neediness is therefore a simple issue that can be summed up in one little sentence fragment:

Locking ourselves into commitments we are inherently unable to honour.

We either acquire the ability to honour said commitments by stepping up production and economic value creation capacity or reduce the amount of commitments we enter ourselves into.

Law and order

Criminal elements can smell a weak and inept law enforcement capability and will. Gross loss of confidence in the police, perception of weakness, in-fighting, and lack of sense of purpose within the Government, and a President who seems more interested in sowing his oats than running the country, is emboldening criminals.

As such, we can now see the ripples of the degeneracy of our politics in the marked and renewed brazenness of elements engaged in banditry and thievery. All seemed to have come in the wake of the last six months' spectacular unravelling of the quality of the police, the impotence of the justice system, and the continued abuse of the powers of the Executive branch to grant clemency or amnesty for political ends.

Constitutional Reform

The overarching mission in the Philippines (as it has been for the last 50 years) is invigoration of the economy and reduction of poverty. Constitutional reform (as it is being pursued in its renewed form today) is a component initiative of that mission. The context therefore remains the mission and the component initiatives (one of which is Constitutional Reform) should be defined within that context.

Constitutional Reform has always been a highly-politicised "debate". The climate today seems ideal for such an initiative to be pursued, given that it is no longer coloured by any cling-on-to-power agenda that gets used for the moronic scare tactics of those who might oppose it. So let's give it a chance while remaining true to the whole point of it.

Randy David's starting from the top most question: "Do we need a new Constitution?" illustrates the right perspective to maintain as we progress this worthwhile journey. As part of the Media, we do have a key role to play, and it is to inform rather than coerce. Mr David provides an insightful reality check:

The mass media and academe can play a vital role in situating charter change within the broader context of societal reform by asking the basic questions: How will charter change help put an end to mass poverty? How will it make our society more equal? What changes do we need to do to make government more legitimate, less corrupt and truly responsive in the eyes of our people? What kind of constitution do we need to help us survive and grow in a complex and globalized world?

A deeper dive into the detail that we need to conquer necessitates that we remain tethered to the basics to ensure that we do not lose the plot along the way. In this way, we keep this reform agenda relevant and the public engaged in the debate.

* * *

We cannot solve all of our problems nor can we achieve every one of our aspirations. But perhaps by taking the Pareto (80/20 rule) approach -- focusing on a vital few that could account for an influence over 80 percent of our challenges -- perhaps we can all rescue the Philippines from the clutches of impossibility.

Drive-thru religion: McAnnulment proposed in Colmenares's House Bill 3952

2011-01-19T00:08:00.004+11:00

If you think drive through lanes for McDonalds was a bright idea, consider then what Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares might be on to. Colmenares is filing House Bill 3952 which seeks to make marriage "annulment" in the Philippines easier. The Philippines has always pretended to be a society that takes marriage seriously. As such, the Law (perhaps one that exists under the watchful eye of the local Catholic Taliban) would rather see an untenable marriage "treated as if it never existed" rather than recognise the truth about its existence and untenability and simply terminated.

Divorce in the Philippines masquerades as annulment, presumably to keep our humourless men-in-robes happy. Annulment in the Philippines is de facto divorce. And that is why those who seek it require lots of money -- to pay for lawyers who need to navigate the complexity weaved into the fabric of our society, all but institutionalising pretentious morality.

Coming up with an affordabe express lane for the millions of hapless Filipinos imprisoned by the dogmatic bullying of the legal framework by the Catholic Church under the guise of an "easier" annulment procedure -- one that (by George!) recognises "spousal violence, infidelity and abandonment as presumptive psychological incapacity" as legitimate grounds for annulment -- is I suppose the next best thing to the far simpler approach of implementing a proper divorce law.

Indeed, the rich and powerful themselves struggle against this theocratic idiocy. As I lamented a poor-little-rich-girl's plight when I explored the impossibility of the concept of "annulment" on AntiPinoy.com...

Poor Kris [Aquino]. Flushing her marriage with James Yap down the crapper is not as simple as pushing down on a lever. Like the national economy, the landscape of options available to her in a backward theocratic society such as the Philippines is poor.

It's time we focus on the Truth and make things simple. The Truth is that marriage -- specially dysfunctional and oppressive ones need not be forever. The idea that that it ought to be "forever" is a relic of primitivist days when lies were routinely considered sacred.

The next Filipino career fad - mercenaries and soldiers of fortune

2011-01-18T10:31:00.006+11:00

Fear not my desperately underpaid compatriots! Even as Filipino nurses pour into the job market in enormous value-crushing volumes as Filipinos tend to do, there is yet another lucrative overseas market emerging for starving Filipino workers. In her paper "Pirates' in the Sea: Private Military and Security Company Activities in Southeast Asia and the Philippines", Katherine Marie G. Hernandez reports that there is a lucrative market for Filipino mercenaries in various war zones all over the world.

Many Filipinos are being recruited by foreign [private military and security companies (PMSCs)] to work abroad, prompting the Philippine government to ban the deployment of Filipino workers to Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Jordan in December 2007. However, Filipinos continue to be recruited by PMSCs using sub-agents scouting for potential personnel and acting individually to avoid alerting Philippine authorities. They then use Dubai, Bangkok, or Hong Kong as 'jumping points,' where they are flown as tourists and are then 'recruited' there before taking an onward flight to Afghanistan.

The cream of military and police personnel in the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National police are being targetted by recruiters from private military contractors.

In the Philippines, the members of the police and the armed forces are on the top of the list when it comes to PMSC recruitment. The resources available to the PNP and the AFP are limited, which translates into low salaries and poor equipment. These factors make members of the PNP and AFP susceptible to PMSC recruitment. A General of the AFP or a Director General of the PNP receives a monthly base pay of Php 37,500 (or around US$806.50), while a private in the AFP or a Police Officer 1 of the PNP gets Php 10,808 (or US$232.43). The lowest position in the AFP is a candidate soldier, with Php 8, 630 (or US$185.591) monthly base pay. Thus, it makes good economic sense for these men to accept offers from PMSCs and work in places, which they may only consider equally dangerous to places of assignment at home. Furthermore, the equipment and weapons they are given as PMSC personnel are often far more reliable and of a higher-grade than those they are issued with their own governments. For instance, Erynis International offers Filipinos a salary of US$3,000 a month to provide security on the perimeters of the Baghdad Green Zone.

That's bad news for a country already renowned for the astounding incompetence of its police force and the flaccid state of its military. But then like Philippine hospitals do today, perhaps the Philippine military and police can benefit from this in the long run. Once becoming a soldier of fortune becomes a mass career aspiration of the average imagination-deficited Filipino, our armed and police forces may find themselves in the happy position of being paid to train and employ soldiers and cops.

Advanced Happy Valentines Day!

2011-01-17T14:50:00.003+11:00

Valentine's Day is just around the corner. Who would one expect to see jumping up and down with excitement? Lovers all over the world? Wrong. Most excited of all will be the retailers. Valentine's Day is an occassion that sees us engaging in a most wasteful orgy of gift-giving and consumption. Compared to that other consumerist occassion, Christmas, where the proportion of durable goods that exchange hands is relatively bigger, trinkets that are bought and given out during Valentine's Day are primarily non-durable. Almost all end up destined for a landfill or a sewer within days of their purchase.

This is because Valentine's Day is a mating occassion. The biggest excesses in terms of consumption and fitness displays are manifestations of a multi-million-year-old biological predisposition coded at the genetic level that is shared by all sexually-reproducing organisms regardless of what part of the food chain they form part of.

Anything that is not essential to survival but is displayed or engaged in conspicuously -- a male peacock's tail, bird songs, facial hair, pouty lips, obnoxious SUV's -- are all fitness indicators meant to attract mates. The silliness of Valentine's Day rituals are channels for signalling one's fitness indicators. An ability to deliver to one's prospective mate costly but pointless goods and services -- expensive dates, non-essential treats, richly-adorned trinkets, etc. -- imply surplus resources at one's disposal. Prospective mates reading these signals evaluate these on the basis of the strength of a single message -- that the signal sender's ability to afford wasteful consumption is an indicator of a surplus of fitness and therefore a highly eligible specimen to mix genetic code with and produce offspring that are highly fit to propagate one's genetic code down the line.

There is nothing about the wastefulness of Valentine's Day that need be subject to moral judgment. It just is. It's just the way we are. It's just the way we evolved. The splendid specimens of our species that we are today are the results of hundreds of thousands of years of our parents', their parents' and their parents' parents' engaging in this process of sexual signalling and sexual evaluation. Suffice to say, individual organisms within species that lacked a genetic predisposition to both strut their stuff and choose their mates shrewdly did not make it.

Happy Valentine's Day in advance (we here at GetRealPhilippines.com tend to be quite a number of steps ahead of most as a matter of habit)!

Primary reference of this article:

Miller, G. F., (2009). Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Viking Adult (New York)

Kim Komenich should know the Truth about Philippines post-Edsa Revolution

2011-01-16T23:52:00.007+11:00

American photojournalist Kim Komenich is out looking for the subjects of the iconic photographs he took of the Edsa People Power "Revolution" of 1986. He even won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for his trouble. Poor guy, though. He has no idea what a big joke Filipino-style street "revolutions" had since become -- a testament to Da Pinoy's renowned talent for perverting otherwise noble endeavors.

For the documentary film "Revolution Revisited" that Komenich is reportedly producing, this much about it GMANews.tv reports:

"The goal is to not only look for people, but also to ask the question, what happened after 25 years to this particular person? In this whole series there's a range of stories, from the powerful to the poor," says Rick Rocamora, a U.S.-based Filipino documentary photographer and close friend of Komenich who has been helping contact some of the subjects for "Revolution Revisited."

Since no one else will do the job of breaking the bad news to him, I will.

Mr Komenich, spare yourself the trouble of "researching" this "revisit". The situation in the Philippines is quite simple, really:

Twenty five years after this "revolution", the same "powerful" folk are still powerful, and the same poor people are still poor.

Perhaps Mr Komenich should speak to Jim Paredes, a big-time Filipino celebrity who not only was there, but contributed mightily to turning the 1986 "revolution" into the towering Aquinoist brand that it is today. Yet in May of 2007, Jim published a blog that described this rather revealing epiphany of his:

Writers have described life in the Philippines as 'magic realism', the same way Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ sees life in Latin America. The child in us lives in a mythic, magical world where we expect a handsome prince to save us at the last minute, or that things will get better with the wave of a magic wand, without any need for us to change.

I have news for us: Things will not change, not until the party wears out and a more responsible archetype takes over who will want to clean up the mess we’ve made.

Jim Paredes famously tore up his United States Green Card in the midst of the euphoria following the "success" of the 1986 Edsa "Revolution". Yet today he finds himself taking up permanent residence in a suburb of Sydney, Australia.

Indeed, the fact that Noynoy Aquino himself is President today by itself exhibits how very little progress in the way Filipinos regard their role as Voters in this "democracy" that was supposedly "achieved" by this "revolution" has been made.

There is one thing right about what Mr Komenich observes so far after "interviewing around 11 subjects for the film", and that is the sense he gets of how much Filipinos continue to latch on to this relic of 1980's thinking...

Kim says he gets a sense that People Power is still very much a source of hope for Filipinos.

"The rollercoaster of the different governments that have come in, they were varying levels of the same old thing. And I think now, with President Aquino today, I think there is this kind of renewed sense of hope that a lot of the old ways might change."

That's spot on, and the easy part. The hard part comes when we come to regard this question which no one has as yet answered convincingly:

Hope in what exactly?

When someone who matters does step up to the challenge of coming up with an answer to that question, then perhaps we will truly have earned the right to be hopeful.

PNoy needs to come up with better excuses than blaming Arroyo

2011-01-16T16:29:00.005+11:00

What's it going to take for the current administration to stop blaming the previous administration for everything bad that has happened and even the ones that keep happening after former President Gloria Arroyo (GMA) left Malacanang? It has become some sort of a tradition for President Noynoy Aquino (PNoy) and his minions to blame GMA for all the ills in the land.

It has come to the point where his excuse, "GMA did it!" is starting to sound like "The dog ate it!". Even Bart Simpson can come up with something more original for an excuse. Worse still, it has come to the point where an official from an international organization has to point out that it was unfair for the Aquino government to blame Arroyo for the low economic freedom score the country got in the annual report on economic freedom.

Apparently, according to a news report from ABS-CBNNews.com, Walter Lohman, director of the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center which conducted the report, the Arroyo administration was not to blame for the Philippines' low ranking in the annual report on economic freedom.

To add insult to injury, Mr Lohman had to specifically speak out after Presidential Spokesperson Edwin Lacierda defensively pointed the finger at the Arroyo government citing that "the indicators measured in the report were taken before President Benigno Aquino took over."

However, Lohman's rebuttal to Lacierda's claim made more sense than Malacanang's standard response:

[...] the country is facing "institutional problems that go back a long time," and these "need to be addressed over the long term."

In other words, it is likely that PNoy's own mother's stint in Malacanang also contributed to the problems 'that go back a long time.' As a matter of fact, his own mother, the late former President Cory Aquino was actually instrumental in creating the current institutional and legal frameworks that are causing major, major problems for the country.

Likewise, Lohman added:

"Factually, it is a report on the previous years, not a report on the Aquino administration. [But] it is an opportunity for them to establish a baseline and see improvement from there, maybe in next year's report."

The key words in the above statement are "opportunity" and "improvement." PNoy has the opportunity to fix things but unfortunately, there is no sign of improvement in the way he conducts things. PNoy is given a big opportunity but he is just wasting it. PNoy promised to improved things but he is not doing anything different to achieve it. Opportunity keeps on knocking at Malacanang's door but PNoy refuses to let it in because he has no more room for improvement. What PNoy does have room for, however, is a Porsche.

The Heritage Foundation measures economic freedom using 10 factors, which they call the 10 component freedoms of the Heritage foundation: business freedom, trade freedom, fiscal freedom, government size, monetary freedom, investment freedom, property rights, freedom from corruption, and labor freedom. Unfortunately, the Washington think-tank reported that the Philippines slipped further to 115th place out of 117 economies.

The report even indicated that it was during former President Fidel Ramos' time when the Philippines achieved the highest score in the index with 62.2 way back in 1997. That was when the Ramos administration implemented key reform measures such as trade liberalization and the opening up of the telecommunications and aviation sectors to greater competition.

Sadly, it has been downhill from there "largely due to recurring reasons: pervasive corruption and bribery, barriers to foreign investment, and weak institutions, judicial system, and fiscal health".

Image-conscious PNoy now has a serious problem because it's not just the Filipino people holding their breath for him to introduce new reforms to "improve" things; international organizations like the Heritage Foundation Asian Studies Center are also monitoring him. But will he have time to do any real work now that he just bought new wheels? He even said that constitutional reform is not his priority -- without indicating what else constitutes his priorities.

No worries for PNoy though. His excuse "GMA did it! is still working on his millions of fans who's main priority is to be more concerned about whether or not PNoy will find the love of his life during his Presidential term.

The top of the food chain of the Philippine blogosphere on Twitter!

2011-01-16T13:57:00.004+11:00

The Get Real Philippines Network is on Twitter. Check out our cadre of elite opinion shapers and follow their work by subscribing to GRPhilippines_Network on Twitter! This is a list of people who form the TOP of the food chain of the Philippine blogosphere. Keep updated on their exploits and the sharp insights they inject into a sea of undifferentiated chatter! Click here to follow!

The people of the Get Real Philippines network share not a political agenda nor a common ideology. What these fine thought leaders share is a cutting-edge thought process that is unmatched in its ability to lead one to The Truth about Filipinos.

We were FIRST to see with crystalline clarity the folly of street "revolutions" that aim for extra-constitutional goals;

FIRST to spot the real trouble behind the way Filipinos elect their presidents;

FIRST to reveal the hypocrisy of Philippine Mainstream Media; and,

Indeed, FIRST to develop a grand unified theory of the TRUTH about Filipinos!

Which, suffice to say, provides us a rock-solid BASIS for developing consistent solution frameworks that address the biggest picture at its deepest root causes.

Why slog through the din of undifferentiated chatter that forms the Philippine National "Debate" when you can cut through all that by following the sharpest and deepest Filipino minds on the Net? Join us and be lost no more!