GRPundit

[ Public post by Facebook user Benedict Exconde ] Four things: 1. Basic supply and demand. If your country has 100 million (and increasing, no thanks to Roman Catholic Church meddling, lobbying and politicking) mouths to feed and your local food production cannot keep up with demand, how do you plan to address the supply gap? 2. All administrations between Marcos and Duterte did not give value to agriculture and fisheries as important elements of the economy and national security (i.e., food security). They wanted agrarian communities to do away with agriculture and become laborers in the manufacturing and service sectors, which are controlled by the ruling class, with the "pro-masses" Maoists getting regular payola from them. The failure of these administrations to come up with a comprehensive long-term national food security and rural development plan and their sheer lack of regard to agrarian communities brought us to where we are now, a clusterfuck that Duterte ...

Poverty is a choice. This is most specially true in the 21st Century where information and technology needed to make the right choices are at everyone's fingertips. Thus, a call to Filipinos from a revered celebrity such as one issued by Inigo Pascual is long overdue... There's nothing like the right conversations being started with the backing of a celebrity. Back in 2013, top media personality Bianca Gonzalez made a similar call that also kicked up a storm around the topic of the poor's renowned sense of entitlement... Ang dami nating nagtatrabaho para makaipon para sa prime lot at bahay plus buwis pa. Bakit nga ba bine-baby ang mga informal settlers? Translated: “So many people working hard to save to buy a house on prime land while paying their taxes. Why do we have to baby these informal settlers?” It is an old concept. The simple principle behind Gonzalez’s tweet is rule of law and everyone — whether rich or poor — being subject to it. These ar...

The last few days must have been really hard for never-had-been-chief-justice Lourdes Sereno. Congratulations have continued to pour in citing not just newly-appointed Chief Justice Teresita De Castro's eminent qualifications but also her being the Philippines' first female Chief Justice. Indeed, this is a huge blow to Sereno. It is very likely that she regrets the day former President Benigno Simeon 'BS' Aquino III suggested she step up to the office she now never occupied. To add to the humiliation is the evidently warm welcome accorded to De Castro by the Supreme Court staff. Suffice to say, it can be easily surmised that Sereno was not at all well-liked by her never-had-been colleagues and staff in the High Court. Sereno is better off lying low and ignoring any further pats on the back (and on the head) coming from the Yellowtard community. This is a community of inbred thinkers who had utterly failed to evolve. And Sereno is a sad casualty of this Yellowt...

Photo source: @AttyGlennChong All the "thought leaders" of the Yellowtard-led Philippine Opposition could do is whine about why they believe newly-appointed Chief Justice Teresita De Castro is not "fit" to be Chief Justice. Other than that, the Yellowtards cannot seem to come up with any more objective reasons why they do not like De Castro. All the Yellowtards really want is for their preferred girl the now never-had-been-chief-justice Lourdes Sereno to be reinstated (or rather to have her appointment un-voided). But the fact is, De Castro, by all accounts, is the better-qualified magistrate. Just on the basic things, like her psych evaluation results and her compliance to the requirement for all public servants to have a complete record of Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs), De Castro is eminently qualified. As far as basic requirements to be a civil servants alone, De Castro already beats Sereno hands down. You wonder then: What is...

It's high time Filipinos who have had enough with the Yellowtards decide on the fate of certain monuments and icons that they have been subject to for many years! The 500-peso bill... The Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA)... The EDSA Shrine... Ninoy Aquino Monument, Makati... Indeed, the time has come for Filipinos to decide whether or not they would like to continue to live under the banner of an obsolete narrative!

It seems Filipinos are a bit confused about the two notions and they seem to owe that confusion to (1) the imprecision of their “national language” and (2) their deeply-religious collective character. Indeed, the imprecise way Filipinos evaluate concepts is evident in the flaccid nature of their national “debate”. The country’s foremost “thought leaders” habitually go off on shrill “activist” campaigns on the back of ill-defined and sloppily-framed premises. The messiness with which Filipino thinkers chart the discourse continues to contribute to the wishy-washiness of Filipinos’ concept of what defines their nationhood. This is why “heroes” and “martyrs” matter a lot to the Philippines’ cadre of politically-passionate “thought leaders” — because grounding of advocacies, movements, and political platforms on the theatrics of melodrama is easier. It is definitely easier than doing the hard intellectual heavy-lifting of framing issues properly and intelligently. Thus, Filipinos’ m...