Then the title goes to Volcan Point in the Philippines. Treehugger has a great series of zoom-in photos that show you how that complicated geological title was won.
via Philippine island qualifies its way to a “World’s Largest” title Boing Boing.
rePost:Better Politicians :: Better Press Corp :: Better Celebrities :: Better Philippines :Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR
We need something like this in the Philippines. I think this should start with trying to organize all recorded interviews we have of candidates. These interviews we tag with their positions and the context. We could do this for everything a politician/journalist/business people/celebrity etc. says. Then whenever a new video is entered into our database we can automatically query flip-flopping, bad policy advice etc! This can be done by us the citizens of the Philippines. I hope someone does this.
PS: The cynic in me keeps remembering Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s “I lied!!!”
PS1: Listen to the npr audio in the linked post.
Ps2: One of the things I’d miss from my current job is the US IP address. No more full episodes of The Daily Show. Colbert Report and
For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, “What would Walter think?” Nowadays, it’s not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it’s more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.
Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host “has gone from optional to indispensable” in just a few short years.
And Williams tells NPR’s Guy Raz that on occasion, when he feels his broadcast tap-dancing toward the precipice — tossing around a story idea for “what I call Margaret Mead journalism — where we ‘discover Twitter,’ ” for instance, or entertaining some other unfortunate editorial possibility — “I will, and have, said that, ‘You know, maybe we can just give a heads-up to Jon to set aside some time for that tonight.’
“I should quickly add, we have another set of standards we put our stories through,” Williams cautions. “But Jon’s always in the back of my mind. … When you make The Daily Show, it’s usually not for a laurel, it’s for a dart.”
None of this, the NBC anchor says, is to claim that Stewart and his crew have had some wholesale transformative effect on the news media.
But “a lot of the work that Jon and his staff do is serious,” Williams says. “They hold people to account, for errors and sloppiness. … It’s usually delivered with a smile — sometimes not. It’s not who we do it for, it’s not our only check and balance, but it’s healthy — and it helps us that he’s out there.”
via Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News : NPR.
Better Class of Politicians:: C5 Road Extension
At the start of this campaign I was hopeful, I didn’t think that the two contenders were too far apart if what they could possibly do. What one lacked in experience he made up for with the enthusiasm and moral authority people believe he had. The other one may lack this but he more than made up for it with his managerial ability and a solid foundation in what works in business. This is bad for our country. It seems that Vince would probably win our 20 year bet on the Philippines.
rePost:Philippine Housing Bubble?:An Alternate Theory about the Root Cause of the Current Economic Crisis | Angry Bear
Ewan. I’d like to do the legwork on this problem but I don’t know where to get the data for it. Let’s just say that I’m feeling that the developments going in and around the Metro (GMA, Metro Cebu, Metro Davao, Some Parts of Luzon) are the beginnings of a housing bubble Japan style, only we don’t have a government flush with cash and a household savings of more than 3 Trillion dollars. I pray I’m wrong because this may not be good.
As the dual forces of technology and globalization progressed over the past decade, I suspect it became pretty clear to most average workers that holding a job at the prevailing wage offered little hope for getting ahead. Recognition of that reality certainly played an important role in the politics that led to the creation of subprime lending programs. You can make a pretty strong case that the housing bubble was caused not simply by low interest rates but by widespread recognition that investing in a home represented perhaps the only viable hope for a typical American family to achieve any measure of prosperity.
via An Alternate Theory about the Root Cause of the Current Economic Crisis | Angry Bear.
rePost:Confidence Of Filipino Industrialist:A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows
The countries that have most successfully rebuilt their economies, including Japan and Korea, went through extremely protectionist infant-industry phases, with America’s blessing; the United States never permitted the Philippines such a period. The Japanese and Koreans now believe they can take on anybody; the confidence of Filipino industrialists seems to have been permanently destroyed.
via A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows.
rePost::A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows
Nationalism is valuable when it gives people a reason not to live in the world of Hobbes–when it allows them to look beyond themselves rather than pursuing their own interests to the ruination of everyone else. I assume that most people in the world have the same mixture of selfish and generous motives; their cultures tell them when to indulge each impulse. Japan is strong in large part because its nationalist-racial ethic teaches each Japanese that all other Japanese deserve decent treatment. Non-Japanese fall into a different category. Individual Filipinos are at least as brave, kind, and noble-spirited as individual Japanese, but their culture draws the boundaries of decent treatment much more narrowly. Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay. The mutual tenderness among the people of Smoky Mountain is enough to break your heart. But when observing Filipino friendships I thought often of the Mafia families portrayed in The Godfather: total devotion to those within the circle, total war on those outside. Because the boundaries of decedent treatment are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at least 90 percent of the people in the country. And because of this fragmentation–this lack of nationalism–people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen.
via A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows.
rePost:Rich Vs Poor:A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows
The bizarre good cheer of Smoky Mountain undoubtedly says a lot about the Filipinos’ spiritual resilience. But like the sex industry, which is also fairly cheerful, it says something depressing about the other choices people have. When I was in one of the countless squatter villages in Manila, talking with people who had built houses out of plywood and scavenged sheet metal, and who lived eight to a room, I assumed it must be better to be poor out in the countryside, where at least you had some space and clean air to breathe. Obviously, I was being romantic. Back home there was no way to earn money, and even in Smoky Mountain people were only a four-cent jeepney ride away from the amusements of the big city.
In Smoky Mountain and the other squatter districts, I couldn’t help myself: try as I would not to, I kept dwelling on the contrast with the other extreme of Filipino life, the wealthy one. The contrast is relatively hard to see in Manila itself, since so much of the town’s wealth is hidden, literally walled up in the fortified “villages.’ But one day, shortly after I’d listened to scavengers explain why some grades of animal bone were worth more on the resale market than others, I tagged along with a friend and visited one of Manila’s rich young families in the mountains outside town.
To enter the house we had to talk our way past a rifleman at the gate–a standard fixture not only of upper-class areas of Manila but also of banks, office buildings, McDonald’s–and then follow a long, twisting driveway to a mountaintop palace. The family was, of course, from old money; they were also well educated, public-spirited, sincere. But I spent my day with them in an ill-concealed stupor, wandering from room to room and estimating how many zillions of dollars had been sunk into the art, furniture, and fixtures. We ate lunch on the patio, four maids in white dresses standing at attention a few paces off, each bearing a platter of food and ready to respond instantly when we wanted more. Another maid stood behind my chair, leaning over the table and waving a fan back and forth to drive off any flies. As we ate, I noticed a strange rat-a-tat sound from inside the house, as if several reporters had set up a city room and were pounding away on old Underwoods. When we finished our dessert and went inside, I saw the explanation. Another two or three uniformed servants were stationed inside the cathedral-like living room, incessantly twitching their flyswatters against the walls.
via A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows.
rePost::A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows
Found this I don’t know how but it’s really sad that a lot of the things said in this article is still true after what 22 Years.
Still, for all the damage Marcos did, it’s not clear that he caused the country’s economic problems, as opposed to intensifying them. Most of the things that now seem wrong with the economy–grotesque extremes of wealth and poverty, land-ownership disputes, monopolistic industries in cozy, corrupt cahoots with the government–have been wrong for decades. When reading Philippine novels or history books, I would come across a passage that resembled what I’d seen in the Manila slums or on a farm. Then I would read on and discover that the description was by an American soldier in the 1890s, or a Filipino nationalist in the 1930s, or a foreign economist in the 1950s, or a young politician like Ferdinand Marcos or Benigno Aquino in the 1960s. “Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. . . . Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite.” The precise phrasing belongs to Benigno Aquino, in his early days in politics, but the thought has been expressed by hundreds of others. Koreans and Japanese love to taunt Americans by hauling out old, pompous predictions that obviously have not come true. “Made in Japan” would always mean “shoddy.” Korea would “always” be poor. Hah hah hah! You smug Yankees were so wrong! Leafing back through Filipinology has the opposite effect: it is surprising, and depressing, to see how little has changed.
via A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines? – James Fallows.
rePost::World's Friendliest Countries – Forbes.com
Let me just state that I resent that the Philippines is not on this list!!!
World’s Friendliest Countries
Rebecca Ruiz, 12.01.09, 12:01 AM EST
These nations are the most hospitable to expatriates, according to a new report.
Rank Country Making Friends Making Local Friends Joining Community Groups Organizing School For My Children Organizing My Finances Organizing My Health Care Finding Somewhere To Live Setting Up Utilities
1 Bahrain 5 20 1 5 3 1 2 4
2 Canada 11 2 3 6 7 8 5 2
3 Australia 10 6 9 7 1 7 11 5
4 Thailand 1 16 18 4 11 2 1 9
5 Malaysia 4 14 19 1 3 3 4 13
6 South Africa 6 2 8 3 14 6 3 14
7 Hong Kong 3 17 12 17 2 5 8 3
8 Singapore 7 18 24 13 6 4 13 1
9 Spain 12 8 13 18 10 9 7 8
10 United States 15 7 4 12 20 24 10 7
Methodology
The Expat Explorer survey was commissioned by HSBC Bank International and conducted by the research company FreshMinds. More than 3,100 expatriates were surveyed between February and April 2009.The respondents were asked to rate 23 factors related to their quality of life, including food, entertainment, transportation, health care, finances, education and their ability to make friends. Each criterion is equally weighted to arrive at a score. The overall ranking is based on the average score for a country across the criteria. Eight measures were also selected to comprise the integration score: organizing school for my children; organizing my finances; organizing my health care; finding somewhere to live; making friends; making local friends; setting up utilities; and joining local community groups. The integration score was used to determine the friendliest countries.
via World’s Friendliest Countries – Forbes.com.
Praise::Christian Bautista offered to do TV series in Indonesia | ABS-CBN News Online Beta
Good for him. We really need to export our artists/various media/various entertainment resources. This is one of the few ways we could possibly re-awaken the sleeping movie industry, take the music industry to the next level, and be the cultural capital of south east asia. To do this even with the weakest economy compared to the countries that matter would be a great achievement.
Christian Bautista offered to do TV series in Indonesia
abs-cbnNEWS.com | 01/28/2010 6:53 PM
MANILA, Philippine – Don’t be surprised if you see less of crooner Christian Bautista.
The singer recently announced that he got an offer to do a television series in Indonesia.
He also has to stay outside the country for a while to fulfill his numerous music commitments not only in Indonesia but in Malaysia as well, he added.
Thus, learning how to speak Bahasa fluently is a must, he said.
“Ngayon hahanapin ko ang mga kaibigan kong Malaysian dito sa Philippines para mag-aral talaga ako ng Bahasa kasi that's the only way. I'm very interested pero ipa-plano muna yon,” Bautista told ABS-CBN News.
Dubbed as “Asia's Pop Idol” and “Asia's Romantic Balladeer,” Bautista quickly clarified that his singing career is still his top priority.
via Christian Bautista offered to do TV series in Indonesia | ABS-CBN News Online Beta.