Points of View & Perspectives

October, 2016

  • 2 October

    Sex, lies and video tape

    When the story first broke that there was a possibility that the opposition senator then chairing the congressional investigation on the extra judicial killings perpetrated recently in connection with the anti-illegal drugs campaign of the government might be personally complicit, the major broadsheets had immediately dispatched reporters and photographers in a race to ejaculate the next morning their most eye-catching …

September, 2016

  • 25 September

    Misdefining pork

    This time, the typically vigilant and characteristically incisive debt watchdog seemed to have gotten its messages mixed. As aggressively zealous as the watchdog is, caution and prudence still seem to be the best practices in any endeavor, including the most passionately purposed special-interest group. 

  • 25 September

    De Lima’s political demise

    Is the current situation of Sen. Leila de Lima consistent with the saying that “haste makes waste?” 

  • 25 September

    ‘P125 wage hike necessary, possible and good for economy

    The research group IBON says the P125 across-the-board wage increase proposed by the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) is necessary, possible and good for the economy. 

  • 24 September

    Would a DNA result of my ancestry make me taller?

    While the rest of us slipped in and out of inanities, as it often happens midway in lunch gatherings like a year ago in Westbury, New York, Lille, whose family immigrated from Manila in the 1970s, stared at her iPhone, waiting for results of her DNA from ancestry.com. “Once and for all, I can finally understand who I am,” she …

  • 18 September

    The promise of employment growth

    One of the strangest phenomena in the last six years under the Aquino administration was the dramatic increase in gross domestic productivity (GDP) amid nearly stagnant, if not negative, employment. Note, of course, that employment data are mere derivations—mathematical projections, like the imagining of a figure from shadows cast.

  • 18 September

    A journal I wish I had written 20 years ago

    But none of it would have been possible—after all, in improbability lies the essence of a wish; no amount of flailing to reach the sky from the ground, it’s like that. Yet, because the past hardly ever locks us in, almost exactly the same wish somehow pops up.

  • 11 September

    Enriching the anti-poor

    Some people in the last administration seem to have gotten their messages and mandates mixed. Ironically, the confusion seems to emanate from an agency whose very name encompasses a vast, however, focused spectrum that clearly spells out its singular objective as well as its singular target market.

  • 11 September

    My name is Cicero, what’s yours?

    It had stunned me so much so that I leaned to have a closer look at the operator of the Greyhound bus bound for Atlantic City.

  • 11 September

    Give Duterte emergency powers now

    Lately, there are concerns that Sen. Grace Poe could be silently blocking the bid of the new administration to have President Duterte vested with special powers to help him solve the grave traffic woes of Metro Manila.