Philippine and Filipino politics: Theatres of the absurd

This pictorial report by Philstar got me curious... is the man on the right blind? Why does he have to wear shades at the swearing ceremony of his newly sworn in legislator wife?

Navotas Mayor Toby Tiangco swears in new Malabon-Navotas Rep. Josephine Lacson-Noel during a ceremony at the city hall yesterday as Noel’s husband, An Waray party-list Rep. Florencio Noel looks on. JERRY BOTIAL

And Filipino politics wouldn't be complete without the absurd...

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UNFLAGGING ADMIRATION As election fever heats up in their home country, Filipinos in Las Vegas proclaim their boxing idol as their choice for the highest office in the land following the Pacquiao-Cotto fight on Sunday. KEATS LONDON/INQUIRER LAS VEGAS

With Comelec's Nicodemo Ferrer topping the list of perverted Philippine politicos...

Ferrer puts another foot in his mouth

BY GERARD NAVAL

[...] WILL the lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders in both chambers of Congress please stand up to be identified?

That’s because Election Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer won’t name them, even as he said these personalities already abound in Congress and are more than sufficient in numbers to do away with the need to accredit party list applicant Ang Ladlad whose petition for accreditation was denied by Ferrer’s division last week.

"Sinabi ko na sa kanila (Ang Ladlad) you are over-represented in the Lower House and Upper House," Ferrer told reporters. [...]

I'm curious. Is this the man who is in charge of counting the votes after election? But the man is so idiotic, he can't even count properly!

Why I believe an Erap presidential candidacy is not the right way forward

On a lunch break, taking time out to post my reply to a missive about Erap...

Hi B.....,

Your thoughts on another Erap presidency are greatly appreciated. However, I'm afraid I personally will need a lot more of "convincing" to believe that Erap is the country's best way forward.

I know Pres Estrada personally and had a glimpse up close of how he worked during his presidency. I was opposed and virulently so against his ouster not because I thought he was an excellent president but because the coup d'état committed against him, I believed -- and continue to believe, violated the Constitution. That, to me, is the height of moral and legal wrong.

Maybe he has reformed, maybe he has wisened up and perhaps he has become a potentially efficient and good leader but perhaps, he has not. Is it a risk worth taking? I think not. He is also over 70 and whether we like it or not, the man has not actually lived a "healthy" life so there are chances that he may not physically and mentally meet the pressure and the demands of the presidency of the 21st century Philippines.

In any case, I'm not sure it's a good idea to elect a man again who has been given a shot at the presidency but failed; like it or not, his ouster from office in such violent and divisive circumstances showed failure of leadership. This blot on his record will be difficult to sweep, and must not be just swept, under the rug.

But I agree that he is still a force to reckon with where the "masa" is concerned and in that regard, he evidently has a major role to play in the upcoming elections. Perhaps, he could or should act as a consensus builder in the selection of the opposition's presidential standard bearer and become the ultimate 'unifier' of the opposition electorate (if that's at all possible), but as to nominating him to be the official candidate against Gloria Macapagal's forces, I think, would be self-defeating.

Just my thoughts.

Regards,

A

Malaysia Royal Navy gets delivery of Scorpene class sub

Controvery in Malaysia over submarines purchased through direct negotiations.

Actually, Malaysia began negotiating for the acquisition of 2 submarines from Armaris of France and Navantia of Spain in 1998 and signed the 1.084 billion euro deal in June 2002.

The deal had already provoked controversy in 2001 when people who were involved in the deal filed a lawsuit against a friend of PM Najib Tun Razak, who was defence chief at the time, had been designated as the main negotiating agent for the contract. The purchase was made without going through a tender.

The first submarine KD Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Scorpène class, docked at Port Klang on Sept 3 2009. The Malaysian Royal Navy announced that it may acquire more submarines in the future.

Taking down of the Causescus: won't ever happen in the Philippines

The Philippines is a corrupt society because its government is corrupt. Its government is corrupt beyond imagination because its leaders are extraordinarily and shamelessly corrupt. It's leaders are corrupt because Filipinos allow them to be corrupt. At the end of the day, the nation has the government and leaders it deserves.

Conjugal corruption, family kleptocracy, lying, cheating, thieving, are but normal par for the course in Philippine politics where political dynasties lord it over the teeming impoverished population. Political abuses are accepted as part of life in the Philippines. Honour is an unknown quantity in Philippine politics. Moral courage is something that has yet to be defined in the Philippines.

What happened to Romania's leader Nicolae Causescu and his wife 20 years ago will never happen in the Philippines. It takes a combination of courage and honour to do that.

'A Mission of Honor'
Key Players Recall Romania's Bloody Revolution

By Walter Mayr

The fall of the Iron Curtain manifested itself violently 20 years ago in Romania, with the execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. Two decades after, some of the key players in the revolution recall the murky events that saw the toppling of the leader and bloodbath across the country.

The camera slowly pans across the faces of the executed, across the waxy face of the woman, surrounded by a trail of blood in the dust of the barrack yard, and across the face of her husband, his eyes wide open in the moment of death. Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, their arms tied behind their backs, died on Dec. 25, 1989 in a hail of bullets from Kalashnikov machine guns.

The faces of the marksmen remain in the dark in the television images of the execution. In 1989, a year of sweeping change in Eastern Europe, the only chapter that ended with the death of a head of state was written by Romanian soldiers, and kept hidden from the public eye.

More here.

Photos of Romanian leader and his wife from Der Spiegel

After Ondoy and Pepeng, Filipinos need to start engaging brain!

I've come back from a self-imposed hiatus from this blog to express my indignation over what's happening in Baguio that I read in Barrio Siete.

Reynz, the kapitana del barrio is shocked that Baguio City is under water as these pictures show!

Reynz said:

I was in a trance! Shocking! I can never imagine that Baguio City, with an an altitude of approximately 1500 meters or 5100 ft could be flooded like this...

I'm gobsmacked too! Baguio city is, rather, used to be my favourite city in Pinas — I lived there a million years ago, and I’m upset that the combination of nature's wrath and human stupidity has allowed this tragedy to happen. So, bear with me and allow me to rant...

The people in this country really need to start engaging brain!

Don’t people in this country know that they cannot just dump garbage everywhere? That they cannot just pull out trees left right and center? That they cannot just excavate and excavate? That they cannot just build on and occupy every inch of land without proper drainage and sewage system? That they cannot just build houses, subdivisions, etc. on marshes? That they cannot keep on shitting with the environment forever and ever and not suffer the consequence? That tragedies could be be minimised if only Pinoys didn’t practice scorched earth policy in terms of urban planning?

Good heavens! What’s wrong with the people of this country? What’s wrong with its leaders? They boast of having top education, top technocrats, top technicians, and all the shit, yet they have no common sense, no ability to manage their resources, no capacity to engage brain.

While it’s true that nature does wreak havoc and that it can’t be helped when that happens, it is also true that inhabitants of this planet called the Philippines have not done and are not doing enough, not exerting right efforts to limit the damages that nature's furies inflict on this hapless nation every so often.

And of course, the leaders of this country, who are supposed to have the skills, the know how, the technical savoir faire are nothing but dung brained. They are not only corrupt in the literal sense of the word, their brains are also corrupt! But, in the same token, I blame the Filipino inhabitants of that poor planet Philippines for their 'Bahala na!' attitude to life, excacerbated no less than by their continuous fiesta view of life.

Unless Pinoys begin to have some regard for their land and until they truly start engaging brain, they will always be helpless victims to another Ondoy, Pepeng, or to some other typhoon or storm...

To limit or to try to minimise the damage to life and property when nature unleashes her anger, Pinoys must learn to fight nature back by pre-empting her fury, and they can start this by respecting the environment and at the very least, by imposing on themselves just a little bit more of discipline.

Credits: reynz for the Barrio Siete report and Yahoo News for the pictures.

Blog en vacances -- hectic month -- lots of personal travel to do

Blog en vacances -- hectic month -- lots of personal travel to do (actually will be trekking back and forth from one European city to another on "errands")

Take care y'all!

Will be posting pics when I return... Ciao!

AFP court martial of alleged 2006 mutineers: failure of application of the military justice system

Ellen Tordesillas blogs on court martial face-off and VERA Files video featuring former CSAFP Gen Esperon and military officers accused of 2006 mutiny.

I don't want to enter into the nitty gritty of if or what and when and how or why the officers are facing charges of mutiny but I do want to question the formal and military legal basis of the existence of the court martial. If you come down hard on in, this court martial shouldn't even be existing!

In order for a court martial to be convened, there must be formal and official recommendations for a trial by the military which, under normal conditions, are preceeded by formal and official findings by a military investigation panel, committee or commission under instructions of the office of JAG.

Recommendations by the investigating panel follow a set order of military functions and are therefore a serious matter. If recommendations are for charges to be dropped, the accused go scot-free. If recommendations are for accused to be formally tried, then a court martial is convened. The chief of staff of a defence force acts as guarantor so that these military rules are followed. He is not supposed to contradict the formal recommendations of the military investigation or de-facto prosecuting panel. That's how military justice system normally works.

But reports have it that the official findings and the formal recommendations submitted to the CSAFP were for the charge of mutiny against the accused officers to be dropped. However, Gen Esperon, CSAFP ignored the findings and overturned the commission's recommendations. That act constituted a failure of application of the military justice system. The failure of the application of the military justice system began when he himself ignored the findings and overturned the recommendations of the pre-trial/investigation commission to drop the mutiny charge. That's not how the military jusice system works.

At the very most, all Esperon could have done was to ask for a review of the recommendations or a subsequent report but under military justice system, a formal recommendation by the military chief"s/AFP own pre-trial committee for a serious criminal charge as mutiny could not/should not have been overturned — in so doing the very ethos of the military justice system were overturned and the very spirit of military legal system was broken.

Under major consideration, when the recommendations were overturned by Esperon, was the life and profession of each military officer, hence, military justice system may be harsh but it must be just.

Esperon as CSAFP broke the rules so he cannot, shouldn't be talking about military justice. A general, let alone the chief of the military, does not, can not, just because he feels whimsical about it -- even if he feels personally aggrieved, ignore findings nor overturn formal recommendations by the military's official investigation panel. Again, that's not how the military jusice system works.

They did that under Henry VIII and the Elizabethan times but those days are over! (OK, I forgot they still do that in Somalia and in Zimbabwe military…)

Incidentally, in the video interview with Esperon, the reporter asked Esperon why he changed/overturned the PTI recommendations, Esperon said, “that’s military justice for you, it’s harsh, everything is recommendatory” or similar drivel… Pity the reporter did not catch him there and insist that he answer the following:

1) General, would appreciate it greatly if you could first answer the question, why did you overturn the findings and recommendations of your own/AFP investigators?

2) General, the military justice system is indeed harsh but it is also just so, when you overturned the findings and recommendations of your own/AFP investigators, wasn’t there a failure of application of the military justice system?

3) Is it a part of the military justice system for the AFP chief of staff to substitute himself or to take it upon himself to be prosecutor, judge and jury all in one?

By the way, here is a video of Esperon who calls himself "A guardian of presidents" (I've always contended that the guy was a pseudo military… he’s a professional bodyguard, much like Madonna’s bodyguards, with the exception that he got paid by Filipino taxpayers.)