Miss Representations

photo borrowed from http://wivb.com/2015/12/20/miss-universe-mistake-crowns-colombia-before-philippines/

THE RECENT Miss Universe debacle should now open the door to a future Miss Universe pageant with two Miss Universe crowns. With no pun intended on the concept of wormholes, the parallel Miss Universes would have one crown given to the Miss Universe representing the universe of matter and the stars, the other crown for the Miss Universe who shall be representing the universe of antimatter and the compact stars (white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes). Good manners in a candidate could get her the crown for matter, while bad manners in one of the mean girls (which we now know exist in the galaxy of stars in the Miss Universe contest) may covet for her the antimatter crown, which would probably be the crown that doesn't matter.
     But, in the end (or, as they'd say in other stars, in the beginning), who are we really kidding? This is really just a game between nations and among girls intent on a future career on Earth. [S / -I]

My Own "Putang Ama" and "Fuck All" Working-Class Moment On a Train

photo borrowed from http://www.rappler.com/nation/politics/elections/2016/115954-mar-roxas-wharton-degree

RODRIGO Duterte's bluff seems to have been that, a bluff, being wrong, as bluffs are. No, Mar Roxas' Wharton BS diploma looks to be for real.
     Not that that finding matters to me, for I really don't give a fuck about what a dude studied in college.
     I only care about what a dude knows now, especially what he doesn't seem to know. I do believe Mar Roxas knows a lot of stuff Wharton or fuck, but I also believe there are other things non-neoliberal he should know. If only he did, it'd be in his own and everybody's best interest.
     And that's my advice to my fellow man on the street. Vote for the person who knows what needs to be done and how to go around doing it, for that only means that that person really knows what's going on (as reported or unreported). Conversely, don't vote for the man who hasn't demonstrated knowledge of what's really going on and would therefore not know shit on how to go about resolving it. Don't look at his diploma; diplomas are dogshit when they're all about things that aren't here or can't be here on our streets.
     (Sorry for the socialist working class language and fuck, I'm in this sardine can called the MRT 3 mess and shitbin. Is this your fucking progress, you shitheads in fucking limos?) . . .
     So, again. I don't really care whether Mar Roxas has a Wharton BS economics degree or none. I only care about the fact that his economic sense is trickle-down neoliberal and his political sense corporatocratic. I care a lot about that. [S / -I]

photo borrowed from http://politics.com.ph/mar-thinks-traffic-jams-aint-a-bad-thing-heres-why/

TODAY IS MONKEY DAY

illustration borrowed from http://www.neatorama.com/2010/12/14/happy-monkey-day/

HAHAHAHAHA! This is a really fun and enjoyable moment in time to wallow in! Just look at everyone! Everybody's got a really bad thing or two or ten to say about the enemy camp and their negatives, and nothing bad to say about one's own candidate and camp. In the end, we'll all be the losers!

What's going on is no different from seeing fans of basketball teams slugging it out outside of the coliseum after a game, not knowing that the basketball "enemy" players are already at that very moment celebrating together in a million-peso party!

We've really become such victims of manufactured groupthink in this questionable system of ours called representative democracy that none of us wants to question. We are a really funny species. Happy Monkey Day. :) [S / -I]



smile emoticon

On Presidents as Executioners (or, The Reason Why We Have Courts)

WHAT'S the difference between self-proclaimed champion of socialism and presidential aspirant Rodrigo Duterte and other political leaders, most of whom are members of Philippine oligarchies that created a Philippine plutocracy and corporatocracy?

photo of Rodrigo Duterte borrowed from http://www.mb.com.ph/duterte-shrugs-off-calls-to-run-for-president/

     Duterte, Davao City's mayor for seven terms, admits to having taken into his own hands, out of frustration with our national criminal laws, the execution of allegedly-criminal elements and syndicates that had purportedly hounded the peace and order of his city or, in later years, would try to ruin Davao's peace and order that he had supposedly taken pains to establish. After all, a local government that made it its policy to invite representations from the Lumad and Moro and communist camps---rampant in Mindanao---ought already to have peace as a given. Sure, it remains to be proven whether these executions really happened or are a mere part of his myth or scare tactics for peace and order's sake. It remains to be seen if someone will come out crying Duterte as mayor had executed an innocent man, in the way an article titled "You Can Die Any Time" did, or even harassed a political opponent. But here's what ought to be said: no other leader has admitted, seriously or in jest, to doing (in the past or in the planned future) such deeds as take into his own hands the salvaging of a gonner case. And the reason for it? Well, it might not be because other leaders never did (or would never do) anything like what Duterte claims to have done; it could be because what they have eliminated (or will soon choose to eliminate) in their own time as leaders were not (would not be) criminals or even perceived criminals but lawful members of society who just happened (would happen) to be in the way of their projects.
     You're all right. Duterte as future President of the Republic of the Philippines must submit to legislative bodies the job of debating on what ought to be the wisdom around certain laws he deems needful of amendments. For although it may be true that Duterte had executed criminals that the people of Davao are allegedly happy to be rid of, what if, as President of our republic, he has to delegate the implementation of this wisdom-cum-policy? The debate on capital punishment aside, would his army and police goons or executioner-governors and executioner-mayors always be right about their own final judgments as judges and jury over an archipelago of criminality---as Duterte probably was lucky to always be right as mayor-executioner, or so his supporters tend to believe?
     The subject of corrupt judges aside, the reason why we have courts---and precisely the reason why courts are public---is so that all judgments can be made transparent. For it certainly cannot be left to either a socialist president or a plutocracy president-puppet (and his apologists on TV) to judge whether, say, Lumad leaders, for instance, ought to be executed with impunity (as they seem to have been under the Aquino government) just because they seem to interfere with the national policy on making work for miners and keeping investment ratings high. . . . [S/-I]

photo of Lumad protesters borrowed from http://www.rappler.com/nation/104433-school-head-lumad-leaders-killed-surigao-del-sur

Diktats, Laws, and the People's Representative

AND why all this trembling around an imagined dictatorship under the presidency of one candidate with a perceived political will and a disgusted mouth against narcopolitics, criminal syndicates, and elitist governance? It seems we have lost our talent to verify meaning in our own use of words, so much so that even that candidate uses that word in the same light.

photo borrowed from http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/11/22/1524725/dutertes-presidential-bid-now-table

     Dictatorship. A condition where one cannot move freely or progress to other desired outcomes due to stifling diktats. As if that can only occur under martial law or a police state.
     Dictatorships are created not solely by a giver of diktats but by the reception of them as well. And diktats need not come in the form of commands under threat of a gun bullet wound.

IN all past regimes including the present, there has always been a dictatorship of legalism we hardly ever noticed. The stifling of the citizenry's freedom by laws that do not serve the people and serve the leaders or managers more or solely, the reason precisely why they would remain untouched by legislation, is already a diktat by itself against which we find ourselves helpless. All we could do face to face with them is rally for change, and when the judiciary area of government happens to side with the side of the people the managers would always find a way to go around the text of the new judicial law by the sheer genius of their legalism.
     The mother of this dictatorship is actually simple to see. Since the start of this century, we have actually been suffering from the dictatorship of the laws of representative democracy that have limited the people's voice to their right to vote for political stars alone, stars who will then decide for us and our lives every step of the way during their term according to the laws of the representative-democratic system. We have been disallowed from voting on laws and policies, by diktat of the law of the land, as against what other parts of the world with direct democracy instruments offer.
     Dictatorship is also coursed through enforced laws, not through appearances or tough talk. We have forgotten to look at the dictatorship of our present laws, the reason why we seem to believe there is no dictatorship in the present as you read this.
     Well, remember this. The next time a government official gives you the alibi that certain things could not have immediate solutions or cannot be changed or are slow to change because of certain laws and procedures that we have to follow, even while that official has legislators under his control for being with his ruling party, you can be sure that he is serving you nothing less than a platter of dictatorship.
     Never mind the pork barrel that can change names under the genius of legalism. Never mind all the public information that cannot be viewed through a law we've been clamoring for, since all we can really do in a purely representative democracy is clamor to our legislators. Never mind an "anti-epal" law that can go no farther than be a short-term soundbite from the attention-seeking proclivity of some politician's lip service. The management of the laglag-bala scam alone that we the people could only be helpless against, except perhaps with the aid of a new airport cellophane industry that wraps our luggage with the only possible medium of trust for now, is already quite a manifestation of the sort of dictatorship of inutile or uncaring governance that we've continued to suffer even under the present regime of Benigno Aquino III.
     We haven't even started to talk yet about the traffic problem on EdlSA that Mar Araneta Roxas has told us to accept as a byproduct of progress, or the dismissal and replacement of maintenance companies for deteriorating MRT 3 the selection of which has been deemed a prerogative of Department of Transportation secretary Jun Aguinaldo Abaya, or the failure to distribute sacks of relief for Typhoon Haiyan's victims that we could only gawk at in disbelief, all of which have been managed by the texts for legalist diktats that we could do nothing against except grumble on the spaces offered by cathartic social media. We haven't even started to talk yet about the Lumads' displacement from their lands that are now inhabited by Armed Forces of the Philippines-defended paramilitary groups servicing in turn multinational mining interests. All defended by the diktat of press secretaries' and apologist Winnie Monsod's words that we can only swallow without question or with silence.
 
THE Aquino sort of legalist dictatorship did not come to exist because of Aquino alone. It exists because we collectively chose and continue to choose to accept it and its words. Or could do nothing but accept it and its words, because of the enforcement of laws via the legalist use of them.
     And so it'll be the same henceforward. The dictatorship of any future president will happen when we accept its words the way we accepted Aquino's. And the only way that acceptance could be good is if that dictatorship serves diktats against our corporate enemies and oppressors alone and none against us, serving the will of the people thus, even if still only via one's socialist representation. [S/I]

A New Rule for the Race

For this sincere campaign for transparency about corporate sponsorship of national political candidates, I am---for the sake of providing models---invoking fair use of the photos of NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon (borrowed from http://www.globaltoynews.com/posts-by-dawn-wilensky/) and motor racing driver Frank Wrathall.