The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
I embraced my father’s death from lung cancer related to smoking with what could have been to relatives an inspiring acceptance, instead of my turning into a firebrand against the habit.
Points of View & Perspectives
April, 2017
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2 April
A polluter’s Potemkin propaganda
Among environmentalists, it’s defined as greenwashing. In the energy sector, greenwashing is when polluters refer to their circulating fluidized bed (CFB) coal-fired plants as clean coal technology. That is a lie. It is by no means clean. It is just not as dirty as the toxic and deadlier flat bed pulverized coal-fired plants. Less deadly however does not mean it …
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2 April
Will Congress investigate its own members?
A few months back, Solicitor-General Jose Calida filed a manifestation with the Court of Appeals recommending the acquittal of alleged pork barrel scam architect Jeanette Lim-Napoles for the crime of serious illegal detention of her erstwhile trusted aide and whistleblower Benhur Luy.
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2 April
Invisible wounds
She had turned into a stranger, altered beyond recognition. If not for her eyes that still flashed from a pale violet to purple when she fumed, I would have had no way of knowing who it was that answered to her name—she writhed in constant pain, moaned and sniffled quite often.
March, 2017
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26 March
Killing Edsa
Last month, rather than grace the annual celebrations of the 1986 Edsa Revolution many endearingly call “People Power,” President Rodrigo R. Duterte chose instead to remain in Davao City at the far end of the archipelago. The distance from Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (Edsa) alone was a brazenly graphic and deafening shout-out that declared in no uncertain terms what he …
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26 March
I am a Filipino—Sen. Alan Cayetano
We received an email from the office of Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano regarding a recent opinion piece published in the online version of a major newspaper questioning his citizenship.
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26 March
Which orphan do you know?
In a baby-marsupial way, the little boy clung to his grandmother, when presented to my mother, then a grade school teacher, midway in the school year—not only in hopes he could continue schooling but also to regain his speech that he suddenly lost, as the elderly woman implored.
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19 March
The jeepney modernization lie
This discussion is less about the government’s proposed jeepney modernization program or even about jeepneys than it is about another brazen lie foisted on the public. The danger about such constant afflictions where authorities are often caught in obvious falsehoods is in its numbing and cauterizing effect. The Greek story-teller Aesop would have entitled it “The Boy who cried Wolf” …
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19 March
Who’s the sacred cow in M/V Starlite Atlantic sea tragedy?
In our radio program last week, Executive Session, aired over radio station DZRH, my co-hosts Ambassador Teddy Boy Locsin, Jr., Rep. Jonathan Dela Cruz, lawyer Dodo Dulay, social media expert Paolo Capino and I, discussed a tragic incident which happened a day after Christmas last year.
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19 March
No meat days: What does it really mean?
While fasting and abstinence meant only one meatless meal, friends and I dreaded Lenten Fridays. At times, we practiced the extreme with just bread and water, though possibly only out of obedience—what do 14-year olds really understand in terms of self-denial for the atonement of sins, anyway?