We beg to differ.
I keep reading about people proposing sensible and obvious things to combat the biggest problems we face today, like controlling (and maybe even reducing) population, reducing carbon emissions, and voting for the best leader. All sounds like the ‘intelligent’ things to do, don’t they? But all that is just asking too much when you consider…
Read More “Are the obvious solutions to the Philippines’ problems feasible?” »
Apparently emboldened by the rising anger over the man-made nature of the massive floods that devastated much of Metro Manila last week and increasingly loud calls to rectify the problems related to it that politicians had allowed to fester for decades, President Benigno Simeon “BS” Aquino III has issued a strong mandate for decisive action…
Read More “It’s about time the Philippine government blasts squatters out of the water” »
Whatever the content of Senator Vicente “Tito” Sotto III’s anti-Reproductive Health Bill (RH Bill) speech broadcast via radio today was, the bottom line is quite simple: Tito Sotto is a celebrity. His impassioned speech delivered in Tagalog, the lingua franca of Philippine showbiz, will likely have resonated across the Filipino masses. Sure, he made debatable…
Read More “RH Bill ‘debate’: When Tito Sotto says ‘jump’ Filipinos ask ‘How high?’” »
Metro Manila is, by its very nature, a city vulnerable to flooding. Yet it has grown and developed into a monstrous megalopolis that, today, teeters on the brink of catastrophic failure. Manila is bisected by the Pasig River into which connect a system of natural waterways that both feed into it and absorb excess water…
When former President Gloria Arroyo (GMA) was in power, people were quick to blame her government for what happened during the flooding brought about by typhoon Ondoy in September 2009. Yes, her government could have done more to prevent the flooding but the deluge brought forth by the rains induced by the storm that caused…
Read More “Is PNoy to blame for the recent flooding in Luzon?” »
The virtue of ‘resilience’ has become a dirty word now in the Philippines as third-time unlucky Manila is again hit by another one of those “one-in-one-hundred” calamities that were once the key statistical notion underpinning urban planners’ archaic flood “control” master plans. Although response to the disaster has “improved”, the feel-good rhetoric around Filipinos’ cockroach-like…
Read More “Metro Manila a candidate for urban ‘catastrophic failure’ according to policy expert” »
In another one of its infomercial articles that it would like to pass off to the average sucker as a news “report”, ABS-CBN trumpeted another one of those dubious “achievements” Filipinos owe mainly to their enormous population — our undisputed place in the global scheme of things as the “social media capital of the world”….
Read More “Social Media and Big Telco emerge as Filipino heroes” »
According to Mark McDonald in a New York Times blog post, the recent floods that hit Metro Manila this week “seem to have caused little public anger over further municipal dysfunction in the densely populated capital of more than 10 million” and that, instead, “Filipinos demonstrated a remarkable civic spirit as they shared news of…
Read More “Metro Manila had long ago set itself up for its own destruction by flooding” »