Kahol ng Bayan. This is a poem that was developed around a three-line mantra (its last stanza) that dates back to early 2000 when it was used extensively to emphasize a truth about Filipinos in various discussion forums.
(Added 10 May 2009)

Substance matters in an economic crisis. A financial implosion sees no bottom in a society that lacks economic substance.
(Added 22 Jan 2009)

"Awareness" of poverty is just a fashion statement. We are a society imprisoned in a mindset that is grounded on the notions that we cannot influence our own destinies, that employment is owed to us by Government, and that those who have more have in some way deprived us of opportunity simply by being "more fortunate".
(Added 11 Jan 2009)

90 million plus 1.5 million unwanted babies every year. Half of an entire generation of Filipinos touted as the "hope" of the country is being born unwanted.
(Added 07 Jan 2009)

Philippine Golf: Welcome to the jungle!. Once exclusive playgrounds of the colonial and mercantile classes, today's golf clubs in Manila no longer afford their members a sanitised environment free from in-your-face reminders about the reality that the Philippines remains a feudal Third World society after more than half a century of independence.
(Added 31 Dec 2008)

A great year

What a great year 2008 was! It was our most prolific and productive year thanks mainly to our foray into blogging at FilipinoVoices.com, our satellite site on Facebook.com and our experimentation with content management systems.

As if the cultural issues of the Philippines already presented formidable challenges to our society's aspirations in prosperous times, we now find ourselves in the midst of the most severe global depressions since the Great One that gripped the latter part of the first half of the 20th Century. For most societies and economic entities, good times tended to mask liabilities. Not so for the Philippines. Our own mediocre prosperity as a people was built on a sand dune of Overseas Foreign Worker (OFW) remittances, export of labour-added-value goods with high imported material input, and retail and consumption of non-durable goods.

With very little capital and assets (i.e. actual substance to serve as a bottom upon which we can crash onto) baked into the Philippine economy it would be interesting to see how 2009 pans out (explore this concept here). Watch this space!
18 Feb 2009