Category: Politics

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Better Class Of Politicians Please::Villar defends anew poverty roots – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos

If you show no respect for the norms/procedures that ensure a workable government of checks and balances then why the heck do you want to govern one(government)? As we can see in the US Senate/Congress, an institution where people seem to no longer have delicadeza is an ungovernable group. If Villar cannot submit to a council of his peers in the senate he is showing a disrespect to half of the the institution which is charged with guarding against executive excess. We do not need another GMA. I think that if he just submits to his peers in the senate, not only will he appear as being ganged up on (we Filipinos love the underdog), he would also quite people like me who believes that personalities are trumped by the institutions in the long run. He needs to stand up and declare to the country and to his peers his innocence. If he is not confident in his skill to defend himself, How can we trust him to defend us, the Filipino People.

Gordon noted that there were candidates, who projected to be pro-poor in political ads only to get elected in office.
“You can see those who play cute with people, those who use advertising to say that they are poor and yet they are not when you see their record,” said Gordon in Filipino.
When booed by some people from the crowd, Gordon said, “Thank you very much, alam kong kasama kayo sa mga pumasok diyan [I know you were among those who went inside].”
He was apparently referring to supporters of Villar, who were in the crowd.
Gordon said the poor were being exploited but often forgotten once the candidates were elected in office.
“You have to face the fact, kung ang leader niyo hindi haharap sa accountability dapat hinds iboto [if your leader will not face his accountability, you should not vote for him],” Gordon added.
His last remark was also an apparent reference to Villar, who refused to face the Senate investigation into his alleged involvement in the road project controversy.
via Villar defends anew poverty roots – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

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rePost:Advice to Various Presidential Candidates: The demand for quacks :Stumbling and Mumbling

Read the whole thing. Interesting thought, even if a product doesn’t work, advertising does. This is why we need to force the candidates that we like to advertise more. If your for Gibo, for Noy, for Gordon, for Villanueva, we can’t let the Villar (aka Arroyo 2) to win.
Btw1: except for the Ampatuan misstep Gibo’s brand of campaigning is really good, though not good enough. I especially like the way they highlighted the aviator credentials (Believe this is good for the girls). Gibo has the hottest wife they need to get her to do more shows/commercials. Although Gibo’s interview highlights his intelligence I believe as the GMA2’s popularity boost has shown its about virality, Last Song Syndrome etc.
Btw2: Noy’s advertisements are dull and kind of self centered. I fail to get “Di Ka Nag Iisa”. Campaigns should be about the candidate showing us he/she is worth voting. Di ka nag iisa was made as if you want us to convince you to run. Come on, fix your message/Public Relations team, they seem to be too full of themselves.
Bt3: I’ve written about this before but Gordon should be highlighting his nickname. We need a more fun campaign.
Bt4: I believe that Eddie should just point his followers to any of the three other candidates (Gibo/Gordon/Noy). Religion and Government should not mix.
Btw5: I think that in the next Presidential Forum the other candidates should gang up on GMA2(Just love that GMA2 is like 7ABS hehehe) in the passive aggressive way we Filipinos excel at. Everyone should keep saying. Hindi ako magnanakaw, di ko gagamitin ang pera ng gobyerno para sa pansarili kong kapakanan, etc etc. Though I fear only Bro Eddie can say this because he is a relatively new politician, and all politicians are liars (well not all but close enough).

The 10:23 campaign against homeopathy raises a question: given that homeopathy doesn’t work, why is there such strong demand for it? A new paper by Werner Troesken (ungated draft pdf) sheds some interesting light on this.
He studies not homeopathy but US patent medicines in the 19th century. Despite being practically useless, these enjoyed spectacular long-run growth – Professor Troesken estimates that spending on them grew 22 times faster than US GDP between 1810 and 1939. Why?
The answer, he says, is that demand for them was inelastic with respect to failure – people kept buying them even though they didn’t work. This was because the medicines offered enormous consumer surplus; the products were cheap, but the benefits they offered were huge; there’s an analogy here with Pascal’s wager. As a result, when a product failed to work, consumers downgraded the probability that patent medicines generally would work, but still saw a positive expected gain from buying them; the small chance of a big improvement in one’s health is worth paying for.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: The demand for quacks.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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rePost:This Must Stop Now!!!!: Cabral’s crackdown : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose

Fast forward to today, when Cabral’s experience in being subjected to public scrutiny and her seeing the public was not about to give her either a free pass or would be intimidated by her being in the Cabinet, has inspired her to use government to get even with the blogger who caused her such grief. Recently, the National Bureau of Investigation filed a libel suit on Cabral’s behalf, against the blogger. This is not a mere case of an outraged party filing a libel case against another citizen; this is a case of a Cabinet secretary using the government to move her own case forward. First, she asked her own department’s legal service to look into whether she should file a libel case against the blogger, basically a request for civil servants to do what she could fully well entrust to a private attorney. Cabral then specifically asked the NBI to do the sleuthing for her case, by finding out, first of all, who exactly the blogger was, and the NBI obliged by asking the hosting company of the blog who the blogger is. The NBI then also made inquiries with the blogger’s publisher. The NBI then summoned the blogger to undergo a polygraph test.
Cabral could have asked the blogger to come forward for a tête-à-tête to clear the air; but then we are talking about an official who belongs to an administration allergic to public debate and which prefers to restrict its fights to the forums in which it enjoys an advantage. Why put yourself on par with an ordinary citizen when you have the NBI and the prosecutorial services of the government at your beck and call, and when you can bog down ordinary people in protracted litigation with the added benefit of potentially imprisoning the offending party? It’s an opportunity too pleasurable to pass.
It is dangerous to my mind to concede in the first place that this is a question of law: of Cabral merely asserting her rights by challenging the blogger’s exercise of her own right to not only express herself, but to challenge officials to explain themselves. To discuss the pros and cons of the case, whether or not malice was involved, sidesteps the objectionable reality that the law itself as far as libel goes is incompatible with our civil liberties because the provisions on libel law are an anachronism. No libel will ever be proved in the case of the blogger—but that isn’t the point. The point is to remind citizens that challenging officialdom carries such a heavy price in terms of time and money, artificially muddling the issues along the way, so that exoneration ends up neither a vindication nor a triumph of the rule of law.
via The Long View: Cabral’s crackdown : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose.

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rePost::Cossack Rahm Works For The Czar – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com

This is hoping angainst hope; But what can we do????

Maybe financial reform will happen, or at least set up a “teachable moment” battle with the GOP. But by letting health reform slide, the administration is abandoning one really big policy initiative that is just inches from happening. Let this go, and there’s likely to be no achievements worth remembering.
But don’t blame Rahm Emanuel; this is about the president. After Massachusetts, Democrats were looking for leadership; they didn’t get it. Ten days later, nobody is sure what Obama intends to do, and his aides are giving conflicting readings. It’s as if Obama checked out.
Look, Obama is a terrific speaker and a very smart guy. He really showed up the Republicans in the now-famous give-and-take. But we knew that. What’s now in question isn’t his ability to talk, it’s his ability to lead.
via Cossack Rahm Works For The Czar – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.

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rePost::Merienda with a Nobel Laureate | Filipino Voices

Prof Wiesel advices Pinoy academics that these S&T incubators will only deliver its promise if the academics themselves adopt a more daring interdisciplinary view of things. This would imply a major shake up of how university bureaucracies are run which at present promotes departmental isolation. He suggests that academic departments and even the various UP campuses be daring enough to set up shop at the technohub (which should facilitate departments to collaboratively how to hatch projects). He gives the example of UP Manila’s health sciences research units. Medicine should not limit itself to clinical research but look into the potential of basic science research which can be incubated as new medical technologies. The best place to do that is in UP Diliman’s technohub since UP Diliman is strong in the basic natural sciences like physics, chem, biology and environment.
via Merienda with a Nobel Laureate | Filipino Voices.