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I believe they can. Last July I traveled to a remote part of the Sierra Madre mountains in northern Luzon where I spent two weeks with the indigenous Agta and Dumagat communities of the area. Being a travel and documentary photographer based in the Philippines I do a good amount of traveling around the...
As I was going through the articles of impeachment against Philippine Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, I began to realise how so much of the complaint against the Chief Justice is based on circumstantial assertions. I thought, hey, if this drivel of an impeachment complaint passed Congress, I’ll bet I can draft one...
I can’t help but think that Filipinos who blame former Philippine President and Congresswoman, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) for everything bad that has happened in the country have a squatter mentality. By my own definition, people who have a squatter mentality have this strong sense of entitlement. They believe that the government owes them benefits...
When closely examining the issue of why the Philippines has turned out to become Asia’s Basketcase of Wasted Democrazy, a Tagalog expression actually seems to perfectly capture the essence of our society’s collective failure to progress, improve ourselves, and fix the very problems that turned us into a Basketcase: OrionOrion Pérez Dumdum comes from...
Official records show that there have been 14 Philippine Presidents that preceded incumbent President Noynoy Aquino (PNoy). However, PNoy seems to be under the illusion that there were only two past Presidents before him and he takes turns referring to each one of them in his speeches depending on the occasion. When PNoy talks...
Is the world overpopulated? The answer to that depends on who you are asking. If you ask a capitalist, he will most definitely say no because to a capitalist, the bigger the population, the higher his bottom-line. If you ask the Church, the answer is still no because to religious leaders, we need to...
First we cheered on stirrings of what we described as impending “people power” Edsa-style revolutions that started in Tunisia and spread over the rest of North Africa. Quick to fancy ourselves as the doting grand-daddies of this sort of “grassroots-initiated” change movement, we tweeted, blogged, Facebook-”liked”, re-tweeted, and email-forwarded various newsbits and factoids that...
Diplomacy. The word, according to its definition describes the “art and practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of groups or states. It usually refers to international diplomacy, the conduct of international relations through the intercession of professional diplomats with regard to issues of peace making, trade, war, economics, culture, environment and human rights“. The...
During former President Gloria Arroyo’s (GMA) term, we referred to Overseas Foreign Workers (OFW) as our “Bagong Bayani” or “Our new heroes.” Earlier in the year, some economists gave OFWs credit for boosting growth in the economy due to their “higher remittances” the country received from the millions of Filipinos working abroad. The question...
It is difficult to take seriously a man who once likened President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III to the Lord of the Rings character Aragorn. Conrado de Quiros has an extensive track record of articulating a taste for seeing nebulous airy-fairy processes trumping the more real black-and-white due processes that lend stability to most democratic...
