I Am Not A Sheep

Marco is one of the most annoying people I know. I'm used to being right most of the time the past nineteen years. This man, however, is used to being right the past twenty-five years. It makes all the difference when the man in question is an intellectual Nazi—and no it doesn't sound as cool when you're on the receiving end of constant intellectual bullying.

 
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Ningas Cogon

So the semester is ending and I hate it. It's always the most horrible part of the year when I cram my papers like mad, and since I'm not a fan of coffee, I imagine I'm doing this gig the worse way. I haven't slept at all the other night and I'm still groggy—hello, 35 citations while my classmates just had no more than ten! Why am I OC about reading every godbegotten thing about my topic? I've been turning to food to make me feel better (read: popcorn and siomai yay). And I have a test later. Shit.

 
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A contempt for the public (Part II)

From the configuration of the new House, it seems as if everyone will still have to go on learning how to cope privately. The same elite belonging to dynastic clans are still in the same position. There are people like Aurora Congressman Juan Angara⁸ who, who has at last count 106 House Bills sponsored/authored under his name.⁹ Most of these bills are of national significance, such as bills on the increased allocation on scientific and technological activities, on the continuing education of college teachers, various agricultural and ecological concerns and others. Second District Representative Judy Syjuco¹⁰ has filed 56 bills, a majority of them also of national significance.¹¹ If we base our evaluation solely on their prolific and nationally useful bills, then we can say that we need more congresspeople like them.

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A contempt for the public (Part I)

It is the barbarism of mindless profit-seeking, of getting something for almost nothing, of doing brisk business on the despair of others…it is the culture of shabbiness, of neglect, and of perpetual improvisation. It is the absolute contempt for the public.^.1

Every law passed by the 13th Congress of the Philippines cost P148.94 million. Only 84 bills were passed, the lowest turnout in the whole legislative history of the Philippines. To make that sinking feeling in one's stomach more pronounced, only 32 out of those 84 bills were nationally significant, the rest being infrastructure projects for the congressman's district, conversion of municipalities into cities, proclamation of new non-working holidays, franchise grants, and other laws of only local significance.²

The new 14^th Congress produced by the last May elections should give us hope of a better performance than that of the last Congress, whose achievement cannot even be called mediocre but simply, for lack of a suitable politically correct term, horrible. To think that their budget cost the Filipino a pretty penny—12.5 billion pesos. We can only cringe and hope that the new congresspeople are more merciful than their predecessors because at this point, all we can reasonably ask for is mercy. Not intelligence, transparency, accountability, honesty or even civility. Just mercy.

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