We beg to differ.
Back in the Dark and Middle Ages, the Church was practically the State. It maintained a firm and oppressive grip on the lives of the people, bending them to its allegedly holy will. People suffered and were persecuted, and all of these were done in the guise of God’s divine providence. Faith became the sharp…
Read More “The 27th Law: Playing on People’s Need to Believe” »
It seems that there are certain groups of people who are looking to increase the tension between China and the Philippines with regards to the standoff at Scarborough Shoal. They’re doing it through a ubiquitous medium that we couldn’t think of existing without nowadays: the Internet. And they’re doing it by perpetrating what I call…
The lessons learnt from outsourcing was long in coming. “Cheap” manufacturing meant taking “cost” advantage of foreign exchange and purchasing power disparities between rich nations and poor ones. And the low costs that were outcomes of these arrangements were bandied as “efficiency gains” in the home market despite no real operating efficiencies being actually realised…
Read More “Repatriation of workers should match a repatriation of jobs” »
The Philippines is a country by colonial edict — much like the way the old Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were, as well as many African nations. They are meaningless hollow pin-up states cobbled together for the sheer pleasure, vanity, and mercantile ambitions of their former imperial architects. In the case of the Philippines, even the name…
Read More “A sense of nationalism: The Philippines has no such thing” »
The recent furor over a ruling issued by no less than Donald Trump himself owner of the Miss Universe Organization (MUO) allowing transgender contestants to vie for the Miss Universe title sparked numerous debates around what it means to be a “woman” and what defines “beauty”. The Miss Universe pageant after all is a beauty…
Read More “What Miss Universe really stands for and why feminine beauty exists” »
Flag carrier Philippine Airlines (PAL) is up for a long-overdue $500 million to $1 billion fleet modernisation program following full takeover of management control by San Miguel Corporation (SMC). SMC had recently acquired 49 percent of publicly-listed PAL Holdings which gives SMC an indirect 40 percent stake in Philippine Airlines. SMC president Ramon S. Ang…
Introduction When I visited Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia last year, I saw a banner run across the two Petronas towers with the following words in Malay on it: Daulat Tuanku As soon as I could, I searched on Google what this phrase means. It is more or less the Malay equivalent of the English expression…
Read More “Filipinos: like a ship lost at sea searching for a beacon” »
Does the solution to the multitude of ills that plague the Philippines reside in politics? Is it really the quality of government that is behind the chronic failure that is the Philippine nation? Think again. [Photo courtesy Today in History.] Perhaps there was a time when there were lots of scapegoats that Filipinos can count…