Opinion

BY ABE ALMIROL WITH the great amount of rain that poured in Luzon for several days while Typhoon Ulysses is travelling above land, floods will definitely submerge the low-lying areas of Cagayan and Isabela, with or without the Magat Dam. The poor structure, which gave life to thousands of rice fields that fed the nation and provided electricity since its inauguration on October 27, 1982, suddenly looked ugly. The managers who manned Magat Dam for decades instantly became morons who knew nothing about hydrology, and some noisy politician became a genius in front of the media. Now, Congress might spend several weeks to discuss this Magat Dam theory, and will forget about the neglected conversion of forestland into corn plantations from the eastern bank of the Cagayan River to the m...

BY RUDIE R. BUENO IF teaching is said to be the noblest of all professions, farming could also be the most important of all occupations during this contemporary period. Humankind has to survive with food and other necessities. After the stone age when hunting began to wane as an occupation in about 10,000 BC, man started to cultivate land to produce food. Up to this day the farmers play a basic, albeit major, role in the survival of humanity. To say “my parents are just ordinary farmers” is, therefore, wrong or not justified at all. The Philippines is still, after many centuries of toil, basically a primary agricultural country. But while farmers in many developed countries are very rich, our farmers who provide food for us Filipinos are among the poorest in this “pearl of...

BY ARNEL G. MAGDIRILA, MD CORONAVIRUS disease 2019 (Covid-19) patients must be provided with the best possible health care, understanding and protection from discrimination or persecution for they are also victims. Under the Data Privacy Law, personal information about a Covid-19 patient should not be made public. This makes contact tracing more difficult or next to impossible especially when the patient was in close contact with a person who is asymptomatic or when the patient was not aware that he or she had been in contact with another person who was infected with the virus. This scenario will surely hasten the spread of the dreaded disease to an exponential rate. One of the senators said it would be a heroic act for a Covid-19 patient to voluntarily disclose his/her inf...

BY LEANDER C. DOMINGO RUSSIA is a Socialist country with mixed economic system, a combination of planned or controlled (socialist) and free market (capitalist) economy. In 1990, the first McDonald's opened in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This happened as a result of former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost (opennes and transparency) and Perestroika (restructuring) starting in the 80s. Photo: focuswashington.com There were many skeptics in the West at that time. We were even required by a professor from Hamburg, Germany to read a book titled "You can trust the communists to be communists." USSR's totally controlled (communist) economy was then failing and eventually resulted in the Republics' disintegration. It was their econ...

“I JUST want graft and corruption stopped and the parties involved in that corruption be prosecuted by the mayor, the city council, or the barangay captain.” Thus, declared President Duterte last Sunday, warning corrupt local government authorities that he would account for their behavior once the COVID-19 situation in the country improves. He urged barangay captains, in particular, to refrain from acting like gods in their respective villages, saying they do not deserve to be part of the government if they acted in such a manner. “You are just a human being. I’m sure that you know nothing or little at all about governance if you are there into corruption,” President Duterte said in a late-night public address. The first Mindanaoan to occupy the top political post of the land,...

BY LEANDER C. DOMINGO Quarantined—I don't remember which day it was—I was watching the movie, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" starring Ben Stiller. This is about a man living a dull life dreams up romantic and action-filled scenarios in order to escape from monotony. When his own job is threatened, he sets out on a real romantic and action-packed journey. In Walter's snowy mountain trekking activity, his nature photographer company, while focusing on his target, asked Walter to keep still for the photographer to get a good shot of his subject. Walter must have been intending to make me grin when he said "Ghost cat" pertaining to the photographer's target. In the middle of their conversation, Walter said, "Beautiful things don't ask for attention." I thought to m...