The appointment of a farmer to one of the highest post in the Duterte administration was unprecedented. Rafael Mariano a farmer-leader and a former legislator who took office on June 30, 2016 as Secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).
Watching the Senate inquiry on the murder of a 17-year-old drug suspect makes me feel like government officials are making us look like fools who don’t know anything about law and order.
There is a GIF cartoon I recently saw on the internet of PNP Chief Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa and Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana Jr feverishly licking a phallic bullet until it climaxes. Racy and graphic as it is, it captures the overall fixation of the Duterte administration upon guns and arms, and the unabashed resorting to militaristic solutions to current social problems: Bato and the so-called “War on Drugs” and Lorenzana with the declaration and upholding of Martial Law.
In this side of the world, people with right connections and privileged positions enjoy children’s rights; but children and minors from marginalized sectors don’t. They should be drug-free first and street-smart enough to deflect attempts of the authorities to plant incriminating evidence. Else, they suffer or die and boost the scores of the gamers, who acquire lives, keep an arsenal of cheat codes and brave a long game play that lets them win all the time.
Haribon sweeps down beneath the thick clumps of clouds and glides towards Pantaron mountain. He then alights on the high branch of his wonted Lawaan Tree abode towering atop a cliff that drops steeply down a great river, the source of the waters of practically the entire plains and valleys of the Big Isle.
As our agriculture program focuses more on “cash crops” the local food crops will become marginalized
Kadayawan asta karaatan maglumon. In English, this Dabawenyo expression means “the good and the bad are siblings”, symbolizing the duality of…
In 1996, a Russian merchant named Vladimir Megre boarded his ship and voyaged across the river Tomsk in Russia. Somewhere in the riverbanks of Siberia, he met a woman named Anastasia. Far from Megre’s prejudices of a woman from the countryside, Anastasia can access information regarding the society and the universe. As Megre recalled his encounter, she would lie down on the grass with eyes closed and in a little while, she’s able to give answers to the questions people asked.
Why has the President’s own top economic officials written to him to veto the granting of universal free clean air? In a similar vein, why have economists been against the granting of free tertiary education as they were adamantly so (and still are) in a previous epoch? Are economists such an insensitive lot who care more about saving taxpayer money than helping others to breathe?
From the topmost branch of the tallest lawaan in Pantaron, the king eagle Haribon observes everything that happens in the plains and valleys below, as though by his eyesight he measures the entire breadth and length of the Big Island. He even notices the goings-on beneath the roofs and canopies of the forest – the big and small creatures crawling on the ground. Nothing escapes from his keen and sharp eyes.
