The real tragedy lies with us Filipinos: if so many of us truly believe GIBO is the best candidate to navigate the Philippines through these very tough times and we don’t do what we can to make him president. If we believe he’ll make the best president and yet we don’t elect him because other candidates have more money, more machinery, more pedigree or a couple of very powerful media behind them, we’ve basically slammed the door on an opportunity that doesn’t come very often in the history of a country. Truly great presidential material is rare anywhere, but it’s perhaps rarer in countries like ours where real skills and capabilities take the backseat to sentimentalism, showbiz and media perceptions. Don’t we deserve and need the best qualified person as president, especially at this very crucial time for ourselves and the world?

via Travelife Magazine’s Suitcase Tales: Talking Travel with Gilbert Teodoro.

I’ve nothing against anyone who doesn’t prefer hip-hop, or to narrow it down, local rap artists. What I hate are those instances when people just dismiss a homegrown artist just because he or she sings in our own language and/or just because that artist caters to the masses, in the process discrediting the talent that is required to produce such original songs. It doesn’t have to be hip-hop. It doesn’t have to be ballad. When it’s a local artist sweating it out to write songs in Filipino, don’t be an asshole and look down on the final work because it’s jologs. Listen to it, then judge it. Then perhaps, I’ll respect your educated opinion.

That said, I’m rating Gloc-9’s masterpiece a 10 out of 10.

via Gloc-9′s Matrikula. | whapakk..

About 83 percent say TV. Less than 10 percent say radio, only 2 percent say the papers.

But here’s the clincher. What then are the top trusted sources of news? Two out of three won’t surprise you: “TV Patrol,” and its rival, “24 Oras.” But the third top trusted source of news is “Wowowee.”

The question then becomes: Is one citizen’s definition of a news source very different from that of others? The figures can apply to radio, where Bombo Radyo and DZRH find themselves as trusted news sources together with Love Radio on FM; or to the broadsheets, where the Inquirer and Manila Bulletin are in the company of the tabloid Bulgar.

via Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose.

Finally a little sanity.  If he could just stop snooping on the phone calls and other extreme actions the govt has been doing then he might just get what he lost when he just slapped the bankers in the wrist instead of throwing them in jail.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s advisers will remove religious terms such as “Islamic extremism” from the central document outlining the US national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror, counterterrorism officials said.

The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.”

The officials described the changes on condition of anonymity because the document still was being written, and the White House would not discuss it. But rewriting the strategy document will be the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on US foreign policy, like his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used.

via Obama bans Islam, jihad from US security strategy – World – GMANews.TV – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News.

This is probably one of the top 5 posts I’ve read about the Philippines this year.

Marketman’s Running Survey

In the survey I am running (or if you read this later, survey that I ran), it seems some 40% of readers actually think the Philippines is POORER than it is, in other words, a fairly negative sentiment. Some 24% of you got it right, with roughly 86-88% of the families earning less than PHP25,000 per month for a family of 5. But approximately 36% of you were varying degrees of being overly optimistic, and believed that many more families earned more than they actually do. Okay, so hold this thought for a moment. Roughly 87% of all families in the Philippines, representing 75.7 million people, are living on less than PHP5,000 (USD110) per month per person on average in income.

via Market Manila – Income Levels / Poverty in the Philippines – General.

Okay a little too over the top. but I really wanted you to read this!!!

Want to be a person? Remember: Managers tell employees what to do and make sure they do it.

With people, they have conversations about things that matter to them.

via The importance of being a person | IS Survivor Publishing.

Rolf Potts is one of my favorite writers, and his book Vagabonding was one of only four books I recommended as “fundamental” in The 4-Hour Workweek. It was also one of two books, the other being Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, that I took with me during my 15+-month mini-retirement that began in 2004.

The following is a guest post from Rolf on the art and lessons of travel, all of which you can apply at home.

….

1) Time = Wealth

By far the most important lesson travel teaches you is that your time is all you really own in life. And the more you travel, the more you realize that your most extravagant possessions can’t match the satisfaction you get from finding new experiences, meeting new people, and learning new things about yourself. “Value” is a word we often hear in day-to-day life, but travel has a way of teaching us that value is not pegged to a cash amount, that the best experiences in life can be had for the price of showing up (be it to a festival in Rajasthan, a village in the Italian countryside, or a sunrise ten minutes from your home).

Scientific studies have shown that new experiences (and the memories they produce) are more likely to produce long-term happiness than new things. Since new experiences aren’t exclusive to travel, consider ways to become time-rich at home. Spend less time working on things you don’t enjoy and buying things you don’t need; spend more time embracing the kinds of activities (learning new skills, meeting new people, spending time with friends and family) that make you feel alive and part of the world.

2) Be Where You Are

A great thing about travel is that it forces you into the moment. When you’re celebrating carnival in Rio, riding a horse on the Mongolian steppe, or exploring a souk in Damascus, there’s a giddy thrill in being exactly where you are and allowing things to happen. In an age when electronic communications enable us to be permanently connected to (and distracted by) the virtual world, there’s a narcotic thrill in throwing yourself into a single place, a single moment. Would you want to check your bank-account statement while exploring Machu Picchu in Peru? Are you going to interrupt an experience of the Russian White Nights in St. Petersburg to check your Facebook feed? Of course not — when you travel, you get to embrace the privilege of witnessing life as it happens before your eyes. This attitude need not be confined to travel.

At home, how often do you really need to check your email or your Twitter feed? When you get online, are you there for a reason, or are you simply killing time? For all the pleasures and entertainments of the virtual-electronic world, there is no substitute for real-life conversation and connection, for getting ideas and entertainment from the people and places around you. Even at home, there are sublime rewards to be had for unplugging from online distractions and embracing the world before your eyes.

via 5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home.

Investing Advice!!

Rules That Warren Buffett Lives By

by Stephanie Loiacono
Tuesday, February 23, 2010

provided by

Warren Buffett is arguably the world’s greatest stock investor. He’s also a bit of a philosopher. He pares down his investment ideas into simple, memorable sound bites. Do you know what his homespun sayings really mean? Does his philosophy hold up in today’s difficult environment? Find out below.

via rules-that-warren-buffett-lives-by: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance.

Read the whole thing!

This past is littered with the detritus of contradictions, some of them very sad because they expose a dangerous fault in our character. Our loyalties circumscribed by ethnicity, family and ego obstruct the making of a nation. And this is what we still are this very day — Caviteños, Warays, Ilokanos — we are yet to be a nation. Our institutions of nationhood in themselves are hollow as evidenced in the corruption in the highest precincts of power, in our continuing poverty, not only the physical kind but the most damning of all — which is the poverty of the spirit.

In that tumultuous event in Tejeros, General Artemio Ricarte turned his back on his former leader. If Bonifacio was betrayed at Tejeros, Aguinaldo himself was, in turn, betrayed later on in Palanan when the Macabebe collaborators tricked him into his capture by the Americans.

This is all water under the bridge; now we must realize how our leaders today have betrayed us, too; they used the slogans of nationalism, the enduring ties of kinship, of patronage to assume power and colonize us.

Aside from these painful contradictions, our past also informs us how empty our country is of the hoary civilizations of Asia, the great temples, the classical arts and particularly literature, which our part of the world has in abundance.

Must we then, particularly those of us who write, feel inferior to our neighbors with their ancient cultural achievements, their great pre-colonial art?

via To the young writers of Cavite – HINDSIGHT By F Sionil Jose | The Philippine Star >> Lifestyle Features >> Arts and Culture.

Got this link from Chuck. I agree that my BS detector is calling this a gimmick but, In my view anything that helps promote art, especially to people who otherwise wouldn’t know or go to that event is great for me.

THE ART OF SHAQ

Does size matter? For Shaquille O’Neal his very existence offers a larger-than-life answer to that question. Standing at 7’1”, weighing 320 pounds and strutting about in size 22 shoes, Shaq casts a long shadow. His appetites and ambitions are similarly colossal: a professional basketball star, he has also worked as an actor, rapper, memoirist and reserve police officer, and is now working on a PhD in organisational behaviour. Now, thanks to the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, Shaq can cross another item off his to-do list: curate an art show. “Size DOES Matter” features 66 works chosen by the man himself, and a catalogue with an essay by James Frey (yes, that James Frey).

An outsized gimmick? Perhaps. The line to attend the show’s opening on February 19th snaked outside for nearly a block. And Shaq’s selections, which feature a range of contemporary works of varying, eye-teasing sizes, were plucked from more than 200 images supplied by FLAG’s founder, Glenn Fuhrman, and director, Stephanie Roach, over dinner after a game. Still, this playful show holds up as a satisfying examination of size and scale in art.

via THE ART OF SHAQ | More Intelligent Life.