№ 817. Questions of the Day

  

Manila Times

Signs And Wonders

By Diwa C. Guinigundo

President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. could not have chosen more telling words.

Speaking in Tokyo on May 29, he said: “I watched with horror that the Senate has become this.” He was referring to what should have been one of the country’s most important democratic institutions descending into a spectacle of personal loyalties, factional maneuvering, and institutional paralysis.

What has unfolded in the Senate over the past several weeks is no longer merely a political drama. It is becoming a test of whether Philippine democratic institutions can still function credibly amid intense political conflict.

The sequence of events is now familiar: the controversial reorganization of Senate leadership; the dramatic reappearance of a senator who had been absent for months; allegations of attacks on the Senate itself; the arrest of Senator Jinggoy Estrada on plunder charges; the continuing uncertainty surrounding Senator Ronald dela Rosa; and finally, the decision of the former majority bloc to boycott Senate proceedings.

Until Wednesday evening, the majority senators, with the exception of former Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero, refused to attend session. Invoking both the Constitution and Senate rules, the remaining senators, 11 from the minority together with Escudero, constituted a quorum, arguing that the arrest of Estrada and the impending arrest of Dela Rosa reduced the Senate’s effective membership to 22, making 12 senators sufficient to conduct business.

The legal debate is important. But the larger issue is institutional.

The message being sent to the public is that the Senate, constitutionally entrusted with legislation, oversight, investigations, and the confirmation of key appointments, is increasingly unable to perform its basic functions because political factions are placing partisan considerations above institutional responsibility.

That perception matters.

Because while financial markets often appear indifferent to political controversies, they are never indifferent to institutional deterioration.

 

№ 809. World History & Economics

 Here's a daily dose of history and economics. 

 This metaphorical shot in the head helps us make sense of the context of the US-Israel & Iran war. We don't really leave the past behind.

№ 790. State of the Nation (SONA) 2025

 

SALN Lockdown

MANILA, Philippines — Hundreds of thousands gathered Sunday for the start of a three-day rally organized by a religious group in the Philippine capital to demand accountability over a flood-control corruption scandal that has implicated powerful members of Congress and top government officials.

As of 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16, crowds came in droves. The Manila City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office estimated attendees to be at 650,000 by 6 p.m.

It’s the latest show of outrage over accusations of widespread corruption in flood-control projects in one of the world’s most typhoon-prone countries. Various groups have protested in recent months following the discovery that thousands of flood defense projects across the country were substandard, incomplete or simply did not exist. 

№ 789. Technical experts: Are they truly heard?

Technical experts: Are they truly heard?

By: Raymund Narag 

 

Brainly

 

№ 786. Saving the House, Not Burning It Down

SAVING THE HOUSE, NOT BURNING IT DOWN: A Moral Call Amid a Political Crisis

Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David 

(Please spare ten minutes of your time to read this reflection.)

In the midst of the nation’s latest political turmoil—sparked, ironically, by the President’s own call to investigate corruption—we find ourselves at a moral crossroads. The crisis has revealed both the fragility and the resilience of our democratic institutions. It also confronts us with a question that transcends partisan divides: How do we purge the rot of corruption without destroying the house of democracy that generations of Filipinos have struggled to rebuild?

For decades, our cries of protest—ibagsak! and lansagin!—were formerly directed against oppressive regimes or unjust structures. But today, we raise those same cries in a different spirit. We say ibagsak at lansagin—calling for a dismantling, not of the government itself, but the corrupt networks that have captured and crippled it. We seek not the collapse of the state but its redemption.

As my brother, the sociologist Randy David, reminds us in his PDI Sunday column today (October 12, 2025), “The government of the day—the administration of President Marcos Jr. and Congress—is not the entire state. Its failures may expose flaws in the Constitution, but they do not necessarily undermine the viability of the constitutional state itself.” This distinction is crucial. It means that to criticize, investigate, and hold accountable is not to destroy but to strengthen. To reform is to renew. We do not need to burn the house down to get rid of the rats. It would be folly to throw the baby out with the bath water.

 

№ 795. Depopulation

Demographics: The Countries Losing Population Fastest

№ 793. Corazon Aquino

BY PICO IYER
Jan. 5, 1987

History, wrote Gibbon, is little more than a "register of crimes, sorrows and misfortunes." It is, equally often, a study in black ironies or the fatal mechanisms of tragedy. Sometimes history is even a cautionary tale, an Aesopian fable on the folly of blindness or greed or lust. But history is rarely a fairy tale, a narrative that instructs as well as inspires. Still less often is it a morality play, in which the forces of corruption and redemption, of extravagance and modesty collide in perfect symmetry.

The Echo

№ 779. Hey stupid, what about the Philippine Economy!

Tribune

Bite Back

Politics as entertainment is precisely just that. Popcorn. Sleight of hand to trick our attention. What about our economy? The country now is glued to Tiktok, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram all of which generate and spread political memes, soundbites and daily doses of entertainment. What is happening to our PhilHealth, SSS, Maharlika Sovereign Fund, per capita GDP, inflation, ad infinitum?

"Bread and circuses" ("bread and games") panem et circenses. 

Meanwhile who is minding the economy? Where are we headed?

Next season, Midterm Elections. After that, Impeachment. Meanwhile quo vadis, Philippines?

New York Times

Why Do We Equate Kindness with Leadership?

Reuters

№ 758. Worth of Human Life

In many studies the value also includes the quality of life,

the expected life time remaining, as well as the earning potential

of a given person especially for an after-the-fact payment

in a wrongful death claim lawsuit.

№ 747. Carl Sagan & Science

“Science is more than a body of knowledge.

 

It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along.” 

― Carl Sagan

Note Bene:

"Science is looking for a conclusion for explain their evidence, and religion is looking for evidence to support their conclusion." --- a misguided fool.

I think about them, therefore, they exist.

№ 737. The Politics of the Mind

Mindfulness

№ 732. The US Supreme Court

The Philadelphia Inquirer

№ 731. Chinese in the Philippines & Southeast Asia

Geography Politics & Maps

№ 721. May 1 is Labor Day

Pablo Baen Santos, Labor and Monkey Business, 2010,

Oil on canvas, 6 x 7 ft

№ 638. Tips from Populists

Financial Times

 

№ 635. Inflation

Hedgeye

 

What Is Inflation?

Inflation is the decline of purchasing power of a given currency over time. A quantitative estimate of the rate at which the decline in purchasing power occurs can be reflected in the increase of an average price level of a basket of selected goods and services in an economy over some period of time. The rise in prices, which is often expressed as a percentage, means that a unit of currency effectively buys less than it did in prior periods. Inflation can be contrasted with deflation, which occurs when the purchasing power of money increases and prices decline. 

 

Statista

№ 633. Elections 2022: Voices from Inside and from Outside the Echo Chamber

 

№ 632. Elections 2022: Letter to a Young Activist

 

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…

…The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important

....All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love....

№ 629. Elections 2022

It is not difficult to find parallels in history and myth for Robredo’s crusade. The foremost image that comes to mind is that of an armor-clad Joan of Arc, riding off to battle against those who had turned their backs on France to support the English. There is a long, long list of women who took up the sword to fight for freedom and justice. In 1521, after her husband fell in combat, Maria Pacheco took charge of the defense of the Spanish city of Toledo in a popular uprising against the monarchy; later that century, Guaitipan or La Gaitana led Colombia’s indigenous people against the invading Spanish; the 17th century is replete with accounts of women going into battle dressed as a man, so they could join the armies. And of course we cannot forget our own La Generala, Gabriela Silang, who fought the Spanish after her husband Diego was assassinated in 1763.

Film Affinity

 

№ 623. Election 2022: Politics of Bread and Circus

 

In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace, by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses).

Juvenal, who coined the phrase, used it to decry the "selfishness" of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population's erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority.

This phrase originates from Rome in Satire X of the Roman satirical poet Juvenal (c. 100 CE). In context, the Latin panem et circenses (bread and circuses) identifies the only remaining interest of a Roman populace which no longer cares for its historical birthright of political involvement. Here Juvenal displays his contempt for the declining heroism of contemporary Romans, using a range of different themes including lust for power and desire for old age to illustrate his argument.^[6] Roman politicians passed laws in 140 CE to keep the votes of poorer citizens, by introducing a grain dole: giving out cheap food and entertainment, "bread and circuses", became the most effective way to rise to power:

"... Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."

Juvenal here makes reference to the Roman practice of providing free wheat to Roman citizens as well as costly circus games and other forms of entertainment as a means of gaining political power. The Annona (grain dole) was begun under the instigation of the popularis politician Gaius Sempronius Gracchus in 123 BCE; it remained an object of political contention until it was taken under the control of the autocratic Roman emperors. 

Charot

Charot