Category: politics

jun lozada, gma, and the rice crisis

jun lozada should rethink his campaign to expose gma’s involvement in the nbn-zte bribery scandal.

the rice crisis simply trumps all other issues and naturally we are distracted, not just by the implications for the very poor and the not-so-poor and the medyo-poor who have long been barely able to buy the cheapest rice, but also our minds are busy trying to make sense of the information offered by media about rice supply and demand, and government subsidies, and global shortages, the better to get a grasp of what’s really going on and why.

jun can’t blame us if we have stopped to watch gma do her thing, praying she can find ways to remedy the situation short-term and long-term, because this time really we don’t want her to fail, or we would be facing prospects of food riots.

it doesn’t mean that we don’t want her to resign or be ousted for her sins against the constitution and the seventh and eighth commandments, but until more nbn-zte whistleblowers come out jun would be wise to go with the flow, expand his rhetoric, get into the rice problem, explain it as a failure of policy, a consequence of gma’s blind embrace of globalization, which clearly indicates a lack of foresight and vision.

not everyone loves jun lozada. still there is no denying that he has the ear of the nation. if he would polish his act and upgrade his message, he would do the nation a great service.

rice and sex

writes fr. ranhilio callangan aquino, dean of the san beda graduate school of law, on the rice shortage and the folly of blaming the catholic church:

Let this be clear: The Church is all for family planning. It has relentlessly urged couples to decide under the direction of properly formed consciences how many children they should have and what the gaps should be between them. Given the facts of reproductive physiology, this in effect means that the Church has urged couples to live disciplined lives. The conjugal act should be a matter neither of whim nor of fun-which is not the same thing as the Church forbidding couples from having fun. Animals copulate when they are in heat. The Church expects her sons and daughters to engage in the most intimate of human encounters only when they are fully cognizant of its consequences and ready to accept these with love and responsibility. Is this too much to ask?”

the good father in his convoluted way is in effect saying that our increasing population problem is not the church’s fault; the church is for family planning. the problem is that we sons and daughters of god lack the discipline to practice natural family planning, instead engaging in sex for fun, or like animals in heat, never mind that we might get pregnant and aren’t prepared to feed extra mouths.

the good father is right. natural family planning, the only kind that the church allows, takes a lot of discipline. it means keeping track of a woman’s menstrual cycle and abstaining from sex some two to three weeks every month when the woman might be fertile and indulging only during “safe” days, which is (for women with a regular 28-day cycle) about three, maybe four, five days from the onset of menstruation and another three, maybe four, five, days before the onset of the next. how hard!

worse, not only does the church’s prescribed method of pagpipigil ng panggigigil require a lot of discipline, it’s also not fail safe, you can still get pregnant, just because a woman could ovulate earlier or later than expected, depending on many variables, including emotional state. besides, male sperm that makes it to the cervix or uterus might live 3, maybe 5, even 7 days, long enough to fertilize an early egg.

artificial methods of contraception are infinitely more reliable, with 99 percent guarantees against pregnancy. but it’s all anathema to the church. for the longest time, the principal argument was that pills, iuds, and the condom were abortifacients because they abort life. a faulty argument because pills, iuds and the condom do not abort life or kill fetuses, they prevent lifeor fetuses from being created in the first place, so there is nothing to abort.

so now the church has come up with a different argument against modern birth control methods. writes fr. aquino:

Fundamentally, the Church’s rejection of artificial means of contraception is consequent upon its rejection of the manipulation of the human person. Take the pill. It effects physiological changes so that one can have sex when one wills. This is putting it as directly as the argument necessitates. If we are so averse to other forms of manipulation, so insistent-often to the point of absurdity-about politically correct and gender-balanced speech, why can we be so tolerant of manipulation of this kind? Natural family planning for its part makes use of the cycles of fertility and infertility that nature itself provides. The conjugal act during a period of infertility does not result in a pregnancy. No one is re-engineered in the process. One merely goes by nature’s own cycles. It is nature itself that provides for a period of infertility.”

forgive me, father, but the church should be the last to talk of manipulation. the church manipulates us, too, in more ways than one, with promises of heaven when we follow the ten commandments and threats of hellfire and damnation when we do not. clearly the church has long been manipulating government, too, or we would have a population control policy by now.

besides, please, what’s so natural about the natural family planning method that the church advocates? is it natural to abstain from sex three weeks a month? it takes much less for some men to climb walls. is it natural for women to have sex when they don’t feel like it? fr. aquino, being celibate and forbidden to think and read “impure” stuff, may not know that women are horniest during ovulation. which means the church wants women to have sex when they least want it. that’s natural? that’s oppressive and patriarchal!

wait. it could also be that the church supports the incumbent notion that there’s nothing wrong with an increasing population because this is our source of ofws whose dollar remittances will continue to keep the economy artificially alive. if so, well, the church, and gma, deserve all the brickbats thrown at them for not anticipating the rice shortage. the buck stops with them. the inexhaustible labor supply is their responsibility. let them eat rice, not noodles, cake, or kamote.

scary

suddenly, after more than a decade on the shelf, the Freedom of Information Act is up for debate and approval in the house of representatives.

i remember catching senator drilon and representative locsin on an anc sometime last year and they were talking about how FOIA bills have been pending in both houses for the longest time, thanks to majorities who donot want the public to know about the appropriation of funds, i.e., how our taxes are spent, i suppose, for bayad-utang and, let’s not forget, the pork barrel.

so what has changed? bakit biglang eager na eager si speaker nograles na ma-aprub na ang FOIA? can it be really because it is an anti-corruption measure that will “promote transparency and confidence in government?”

or is it because, in the wake of the public outcry against the latest supreme court decision upholding executive privilege even on matters like the corrupt nbn deal, nograles and gma’s other minions in the lower house want to enact an FOIA that will uphold the supreme court ruling? gloria gloria hallelujah?

scary.

in defense of gossip

the supreme court has ruled that romulo neri is right to invoke gma’s executive privilege and to refuse to answer questions that might could would implicate his president and her fg in the nbn-zte bribery scandal.

as a result, there is no way now that we can get to the truth of the matter. so biglang all the talk about gma and her fg’s involvement in the corrupt deal is reduced to the category of gossip, as in tsismis lang, because it is unproven or unconfirmed, and never natin mapu-prove o maco-confirm. unless of course the court reconsiders and reverses itself, which seems quite unlikely.

well. let’s look at the bright side. at least all the anti-gma nbn-zte tsismis is an improvement on showbiz tsismis that’s mostly petty and personal. how great that we’re swapping stories not only about gretchen & tonyboy, piolo & sam, sharon & kc, but also about political figures gloria and mike, luli and joey, jun and cory, the bishops and romy, on matters of national importance.

the thinking about gossip is right:

. . . gossip can be a form of political resistance to undermine entrenched systems of power and domination. Getting the scuttlebutt about salary discrepancies, executive perks, kickbacks, nepotism, conflicts of interest and the like ”benefits those excluded from power more than it helps those who exercise power since the former have less to hide.”

sometimes, gossip is our only revenge. just as it might be brian gorrell’s only revenge on the sosi peeps who he says lied to him and cheated him and stole from him.