That backgrounder out of the way, I can then say that it is quite heartening that within FilipinoVoices.com, at least, some of the usual suspects had the decency to see beyond their almost dogmatic biases and regard the content of the speech first and then render their verdict on that basis. Without a doubt, it is just a speech — albeit, a well written and delivered one. As such, it seemed to have moved even Arroyo’s most dogged critics. Of course there were morons who seemed to have just sat through the address, pen and notepad on hand, in a mental state that set them up to react only to the stimuli of keywords that were relevant to the question of her political ambitions after 2010:

Everything was a “lie”…

As expected, Gloria Arroyo enumerated a litany of lies about her so called accomplishments.

… and thus:

[...] she is tuso. She lets her minions do the manipulation to amend the Constitution so she can stay in power forever.

… after which this “reporter” proceeds to quote the entire speech verbatim in the same blog post.

Whatever.

As I said earlier, it is just a speech. Whatever way it moved people is nice fodder for the usually vacuous Philippine Media to broker at a yummy profit. True enough, this morning, the always insightful Bandila “news” program already had their cameras and mikes shoved in the faces of Jose de Venecia (live via Skype — apparently ABS-CBN is scrimping nowadays) from Australia and Erap (speech boozily slurred in his usual excellent form) — two of the bato-batos hit by the proverbial stone thrown in the SONA. The third bato-bato knocked squarely on the forehead is squeakily self-righteous Mar Roxas caught on camera schmoozing with street protesters, if I recall right, after “boycotting” the SONA. Very classy, Mr. Roxas. Very classy indeed. By the way, is schmoozing with street protestors part of that job description that defines your claim to your salary as senator of our fair land?

At least de Venecia and Erap stepped up to blabber away some kind of platitudinal response in their defense. But then too bad, guys. You were on the wrong side of the podium at an unpopular politician’s moment of glory and are relegated to pathetic schoolyard-grade comebacks after the fact. To speculate a bit on the esteemed Mar Roxas’s thoughts, I could imagine him hopping up and down inside yelling Tang ina mo! while smiling before the cameras.

The real point here is that this small two-minute sample of “responses” dished out (two verbal, and one grandstanded) by three otherwise powerful men standing outside the kulambo on Bandila this morning could easily represent the entire collective “position” of today’s Philippine “Opposition”:

“We were mis-represented”.

“Don’t believe in all those lies“.

- and most original of all -

“We are one with the rallying-man-on-the-street”.

Don’t be too surprised if every critical word uttered by the “Opposition” in response to the SONA does not fail to crystallise around the above three pillars of “wisdom”, folks. Because you are looking pretty much at the full-extent of the Filipino’s faculties for imagination.

As Ben Kritz observes in his latest blog post:

[T]he real issue is: now what?

(my italics)

There is a simple approach to answering that question, ladies and gentlemen of the Philippine “Opposition” (whether you are “united”, “genuine”, or the usual fragmented and clueless bunch of bozos you’ve traditionally been, whatever). Unfortunately for us, it requires a bit of brain-related work to cobble together. It’s called a platform. Sure you can tell us that God “commanded” you to lead us out of our wretchedness or that you have the “mandate of the people” (in whatever way you choose to substantiate that quaint claim). Indeed, you can even go on and do any of the following:

Cite the dimwitted House or Senate bills you’ve authored.

Dish out quaint platitudes about how things “should” or “must” be in our society.

- and/or -

Quote how much money “should” or “must” be spent (usually as percentages of the budget or the GDP) on this or that initiative or area of human development that all these no-added-value SWS “surveys” highlight.

The trackrecord for making such lofty pronouncements reads out like the sad stocktake of Filipino thinking that it really is.

So guess what…

Any moron can do all that;

… in the same way that any three-year-old can write out an unstructured wishlist of toys that would likely end up in a postal bin of letters addressed to Santa Claus.

Adults on the other hand, take a pre-meditated and conscious path towards achieving their objectives and acquiring what they aspire for. Not surprisingly, those who don’t, are usually prime candidates for ending up grasping society’s short end of the stick.

So in that noble undertaking of becoming a leader in a society that desperately needs to change in order to prosper, what separates the men from the boys is the ability to come up with a coherent blueprint or architecture for doing so, underpinned by an internally-consistent framework of thinking.

Sounds like a tall order? Of course it does. It does to those who have never acquired the habit of thinking things through properly.

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When Philippine House Resolution 1109 was passed we tend to forget that that bastion of truth, that guardian of Filipino democracy called Old Media also slept while you slept, Manila. They failed utterly to be your eyes and your ears at a moment when you most needed them to be. Old Media prefers and continue to be enamored with Kho and the spiteful and scorned women in his life, who in turn prefer to wash their laundry in public rather than discuss the nation’s business.

Have you no shame?

I remember the Cry of Cyberspace. As the Filipino House was about to be robbed, @mlq3 raised the alarm. I remember @caffeinesparks, our eyes and ears at the Batasan. I remember her tweets and twitter was our only vector as the House of Representatives legalized sanity. I remember how Sparks stood her ground when asked to be evicted from her place at the gallery. We’ve captured those tweets, to remember, to make history remember:

Some of @mlq3′s tweets:

Mlq3 Archive Conass

Sparks tweets:

Sparks’ Snapshot 200 Tweets

#conass tweet stream archive:

#conass twitter stream archive

Let us take pause. What really happened as the House called for a Constituent Assembly, and as we Oppose Constituent Assembly?

This isn’t Blackest Night (free and legal e-Book in PDF). In the coming months, there won’t be an epic battle between Krypto the SuperDog and Dex-Starr the Rage Kitty. Though, there is something to be said about the blue light of Hope is useless without green light of Willpower.

Sad to say the script to #conass was not written and drawn (respectively) by the Einsner Award (for All Star Superman) winning Dynamic Duo of Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly. And if we lift our eyes up to the sky, is because we have faith in the Dynamic Duo, together again, to have power to save us from our own superpower to screw up (click to see larger image):

But there isn’t any hero to descend from the sky, is there?

What all this comes down to is that for the congressional dream of “Arroyo Forever” to become a reality, (1) three-fourths of all the combined majority of House and Senate must vote for it, (2) the Senate must supinely do nothing, (3) the Supreme Court must come in as an indispensable accomplice, and (4) should hell break loose in the streets, the military must be willing to mow down the sovereign people.

I may be thoroughly naïve, but in my view it is very difficult for all of these elements to converge. (1) The House may not be able to muster the desired majority. There still are honorable men and women among them. (2) The senators as one, we are told, will fight back. (3) I think better of the Supreme Court justices than to see them as complicit in treason. (4) The military showed in 1986 that it knows which direction to take when the chips are down.
— “Making sense of 1109” by Fr. Joaquin G. Bernas, S.J.

What happens now? Charter Change, per se isn’t wrong, it is the manner by which the men and women addicted to power chooses to pervert the system under the guise of what is good for us all.

We have an obligation to know who we are! We must listen to Bigenya’s “A Call for Sobriety“. We must know where we are to Get A Grip, and avoid the folly of good intensions, that we can meet this and the challenges of our nation building, with our eyes open.

I tweeted of conass that “the Philippines is an example of how a Republic can slowly die, without fanfare save for a few tweets to chronicle the beginning of its end”. And weeks after it all began, is this the calm before the storm? Is this the state of our nation?

Whether you join Blog Action Day against CoAss or not; whether you oppose Constituent Assembly or not, and whether you agree or disagree with Arroyo, this is the part where I hope these words from Sun Tzu do not fall on deaf ears and that you take from it some measure of wisdom: The victorious army first realizes the conditions for victory, and then seeks to engage in battle. The vanquish army fights first, and then seeks victory. These conditions for victory is true too for nation building.

This is for blog action day versus conass.

*Who owns those images?

NoToConAss: words by Marck Ronald Rimorin, Badge: Andrew Dela Serna, hosting and domain by Gail Villanueva.

Bloggers Kapihan is where the blog action day badge is from.

Image of Batman and Robin is from “Batman and Robin Issue 1″, August 2009. It was drawn by Frank Quietly, script by Grant Morrison, and published by DC Comics; used here under fair use.

Then came war. Filipinos and Americans shed blood on the field of battle, united, for their own reason, against a common foe. When both people stood atop the ruin of Manila, we cheered in union at victory. The ties would bind these two nations. And this brotherhood would forever tie two nations together. Then another Republic would be born. It would be a nation that borrowed heavily on the American standard. That legacy continues to this day.

Can’t you help but think that was the Dream?

There are two fundamental questions that the Filipino, consciously or not has been asking. First, why is the country’s politics is so broken? It therefore leads to the question, is the “Form of Government,” wrong? The second question: the government insist that the nation is on the path to growth and all the numbers indicate as much, yet clearly, it has not translated for many Filipinos.

The obvious response to the first question leads inevitably to corruption. While the infestation of corruption is a cancer that has spread across every strata of Philippine society, and continues to devour and gnaw at our society’s spirt, it isn’t the root cause of evil. The root cause is that Philippine politics is fueled by a closed elitist franchise. It can be likened to closed software development. Without new blood to fuel new ideas, to invigorate the system, it becomes stagnant and rot sets in.

The answer to the second question runs just as parallel. In fact, the Office of the Chief Economist of the World Bank published a policy research on “Rising Growth, Declining Investment: The Puzzle of the Philippines“. The paper noted that the Filipino economy is vibrantly open to trade and capital inflows. Market-based economic reforms were implemented. Liberalization of oil, telecommunications, domestic shipping, acceptance of foreign direct investment, the privatization of government assets and the strengthening of central bank independence were all done. Even as the numbers show that growth rate has been above population growth and though only average when compared to the Philippines’ neighbors, it has been the highest in 40 years, the paper noted.

Yet something is amiss. Why isn’t it translating for most Filipinos?

The answer according to the same policy paper is that while foreign direct investment has fallen since the 1990s, the local market has not picked up the slack. Big Business has refused to reinvest substantially. The World Bank blames the lack of reinvestment on lack of incentives to do so. Businesses are profiting now, so why go out of the way to reinvest capital more than necessary? The rot sets in.

Let’s take a leap: if this policy paper is true, then a call for “economic reform” in the constitution become moot. Because it isn’t foreign direct investment that needs to be driven, it is the domestic business that needs to be invigorated.

The policy paper recommended a three-prong approach:

To sustain development in the long term, the economy needs a competitive diversification: from the distortions induced by the oligopolistic conglomerates to a market-driven expansion of non-traditional products. To bypass the foreseeable resistance of the well-established rent-seekers, the government should follow a phased strategy:

a. First, promote the production and export of non-traditional manufacturing and services, by getting the economic zones to perform better (Box 1), and pursuing a competitive real exchange rate;

b. Second, increase revenues, to finance the needed boost in infrastructure and education spending; and

c. Third, implement gradual reforms to tackle the rent-seeking conglomerate economy, to lower the cost of strategic inputs.

Clearly the first suggestion can be done by government and well within its function. The second— to increase revenues to finance infrastructure development and education spending has utterly failed. The reason is that infrastructure isn’t being built at a faster pace. Education spending is years behind. The third, the government has failed utterly to reform in the conglomerate economy to lower cost of strategic inputs. The price of electricity is the highest in asia and remains a huge problem.

Before you continue, you might think of this as yet another attempt to say “problem”. Think of all these as… opportunities.

Let us talk about education.

In A case study of the decentralization of health and education services in the Philippines, Joseph J. Capuno recommended ten ways for the Department of Education to adapt a more decentralized policy of education based on what the Department of Health has learned:

Tenth, promote minimum service standards more than best practices. As another way to promote the quality of local health services, the DOH both tried to implementminimum service standards and to encourage best practices. Promoting best practices of course encourage innovations in service delivery and financing. Replicating the best practices in other areas however proved to be difficult partly because it is hard to standardize the practice so that they can be adopted elsewhere. In contrast, minimum service standards are more easily and widely enforced. This is what happened in the case of the Sentrong Sigla Movement. The Sentrong Sigla seal of quality proved to be enough incentive to many LGUs to upgrade their health facilities. In practice, however, the best among the SS certified facilities are also awarded and given cash gifts. Nonetheless, its unique design both raises minimum service quality and promotes outstanding practices.

With limited resources, there are ways for the government to improve services. And while that only goes so far, is there a grand strategic plan in place that uses heavily what the civil service already know that the grand scheme of the government can implement together?

Let’s talk about infrastructure development.

What exactly are we building again? The old fashioned, tried and tested “build farm to market” roads is of course most certainly on top of that list. And yet, infrastructure isn’t what it used to be. With the coming of the Internet, its penetration spreads information. New techniques in farming for example can be spread across. Businesses can be communicated online. Where once infrastructure is the providence mainly of government, telecommunication is a private enterprise. It goes without saying that that most certainly, “build it and they will come” does not apply to the farthest regions of the Philippines. Power and Water are scarce enough there, Internet and the devices that run on it, would likewise be utterly useless.

So where does this leave us?

Just as in politics, the Philippines needs to create an open, more free and enable that politics so that Filipinos can better engage in it, not just during an election but before it, the domestic economy needs to be invigorated. If this means, a reform of banks to help finance projects on the micro and macro level to spur innovation in the small and medium scale enterprise. These are the sectors that need invigorating. These are the sectors that need to be opened up to help fuel the services that government need to fund.

What’s happening now is that as government increases taxes (not necessarily make it more efficient), it squeezes too far. It becomes detrimental already to invest in building technologies in the philippines because of high cost of electricity and high cost of labor.

American CEO and Co-founder of Apple and Pixar (now Disney’s largest shareholder) Steve Jobs once gave a commencement speech before Standford University graduates. He talked about connecting the dots and how what he learned about typography in college was later applied to the mac. He talked about love and loss, how he got kicked out of the company he built, how character building that was. How he found love when he left Apple. How all the things he learned away from the company he built would later be the core of Apple’s renaissance. He talked about death and all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure fall away in the face of death and remembering you might die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking there is something to lose. “If you’re already naked: there’s no reason to not follow your heart”, he said. That wasn’t the best advice he gave. He said:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off.

I gave the example of Jobs because, here is a guy who clearly keeps going. He’s a master of continuous innovation even when it isn’t obvious to innovate. That’s what our businesses— big or small need that in spite of the lack of incentive, it must find a way to profit and continuously change it. The same with politics.

More than a dream, we need an ideal: whether it is politics, or economics, the answer to the Philippines’ challenges is to surrender all our fears and our doubts, to design a nation that is liberal in what it receives and conservative in what it says. We have to be hungry. We have to be foolish.

*sorry forgot to give a shout out to @caffeinesparks and @mlq3 for the pdfs! Thank you for those links!

Are We Engaged in CyberWar?

Go around the Interwebs and Boing Boing has a CyberWar guide:

“Keep you bull$hit filter up! Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters. Please don’t retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting. The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.”

You can look at Survival and Evasion Guide (declassified information) in PDF is available here.

We were imaging a future cyber war with hackers behind both lines, crisscrossing server lines and attempting to read command and control. I don’t think anyone has imagined people much less ordinary, non-hacking people volunteering to be soldiers in a cyberwar,.

This is where: Anonymous Iran is:

How-to surf securely and avoid censorship: http://torir.org

This forum aims to be a secure and reliable way of communication for Iranians and friends. Use it to discuss what is happening in Iran. Post in the forum either anonymously as a guest, as a registered user, or login with your facebook-account. We are not a government agency, nor are we Iranian. We are simply the internet and we believe in free speech. Read here for more: http://iran.whyweprotest.net/keeping-your-anonymity-iran/29-people-thinking-iranian-government-site.html

This forum is backed by thepiratebay.org, Anonymous, and numerous other internet-friendly forces.

In a real war there are strategic and tactical objectives to deem a war, a success. If this is war, then new elections for the Iranian people would be enough. The way things are going, we may be seeing the first revolution that the Internet has purposely been used and the Iranian people get a fair, impartial and just Ayatollah.

If this is cyber war, will we see this like again or will governments be smarter next time around?

And man, Twitter has been awesome. It has been in China during the quake. It has been there for #bookblockade, #conass. It has been there for Obama. Now this is how Twitters wage a #hashtag war.

Forgive my pirating this*:

This is our world now… the world of twitter, facebook and youtube, powered by the electron and the switch, the beauty of the bandwidth. We make use of these services because they are dirt-cheap and simple. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias. You wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good. One thing for sure, you may stop an individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

Oh, one more thing, Dear Bill Stone: don’t sell Twitter.

UPDATED: I forgot to mention that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Tehran is using Deep Packet Inspection, to monitor their Internet.

UPDATE 2: I got the whole cyber war thing via a RT from @ellisera on twitter.

UPDATE 3: i added it, after my post.

He ate his ice cream with a bun while I had mine in a sugar cone, Ricky, a would-be law enforcer. While I agonized over the dilemma of a choice between langka or macapuno, he asked an innocuous question, “Anong meron?” I struggled over how best to explain what last Sunday’s silent protest was for, and as best I could explained what House Resolution 1109 was about. And while I certainly tried to leave the parliamentary jargon out of my explanation, he was quick to follow what, indeed, the silent protest was for.

Stripped of the technicalities, the way he re-explained the situation was crystal. Here you have an administration, led by a tenacious president, too long in power. Here you have allegations of misdeeds comparable only to the abuses of the yet longest self-serving President Marcos. Here you have a country that has yet to exhibit any meaningful indicators of ‘kaginhawahan,’ was his term. Why, indeed, should we suffer more of the same?

His yellowish eyes were wise beyond his age. He couldn’t have been older than me. His little nephew played near the sorbetero, cocooned in blissful ignorance of our conversation, RockEd’s silent protest, and the infamy of June 2. He said he understood what government was doing, all his life having dreamt of being a law-enforcer. He followed politics when he could. Here he was at an avenue in his life where he had to make a choice of a lifetime. He had just past the exam that made a police officer but could not yet quite make the leap.

I know it would change me, he said. I already have friends in the police force. Do you know they make the newbies collect bribe money? All my life I’ve dreamed of being a policeman, to keep order, to dispense justice. But I’m not stupid, I know what goes on in a precinct. If I refuse to join in the shenanigans, I might endanger my life. But if I do, what would be left of me?

I can’t remember all that he said, but I stood there listening to him recount a slice of his life story. I understood too the agony of wanting something better for the country he would serve, and the compromise of the reality of law enforcement and his ideals. Do you know that I studied by heart a book this thick on human rights, he said. Not every cop graduates a criminologist, do you know that? They don’t know that criminals should be treated fairly as the law provides. If I do choose to become a cop, I would do good by not whacking them over the head.

While we ate our ice cream he kept glancing behind me at the silent protesters. He said he understood what we were fighting for, but why were we so silent? I explained that we all understood what we were there for and so there was no need for speeches or programs. I mentioned the big rally on Wednesday and invited him to go. He said he wasn’t much of a rallyist but he would try. And if he couldn’t make it, he asked if I could go on his behalf.

Early afternoon last Wednesday my friend Luisa texted me to offer apologies for not being able to make it to our dinner date. Her tummy wasn’t feeling so good. I’d completely forgotten of course as I was already headed for the Makati rally. She said she would too if she weren’t so sick. I offered to go on her behalf, this friend of mine with whom I witnessed Edsa Dos all those years ago.

I parked my car in the Fort because I didn’t want to be stuck in the traffic re-routing might cause. I need not have bothered of course, because the roads when I arrived and left the Makati CBD were pretty free. I took a cab from Boni High Street and asked to be dropped off at the end of McKinley. Boy, the meter was running fast. Nearing my drop-off point I quizzed the cabbie about the Makati area, whether he got stuck in traffic because of the rally. He said the roads were clear earlier in the day and asked, what rally? I briefly explained that I was going to said rally and outlined the events of June 2. The mild-mannered cabbie then exploded in a rant liberally peppered with expletives. And while he railed about the injustice of the system, of the kurakot politicians, all the same, I noticed his meter slowed.

Under a scaffolding, I sat with friends, smoked some ciggies and listened to personalities speak on the stage. I didn’t care much what Cory Aquino or Danny Lim had to say. I didn’t care for the senators who were there courting the cameras and the crowd. I didn’t care for the congresspeople who came as well, save Risa Baraquel. I didn’t need them to tell me what I already knew anyway. And so I sat, and picked out which sounds I wanted to hear from the spectacle. Curiously it was someone singing a kundiman-type song I appreciated best. The rest was ambient noise.

As we prepared to leave I was told the Stop Con-Ass Facebook group had garnered twenty-three thousand members. I thought, good.

“I do not know if we can convene immediately even if the resolution is approved today.” – Hon. Prospero Nograles, Speaker, House of Representatives

The approval of House Resolution No. 1109 (ConAss) has been met with everything but sobriety – even the very leadership of the House of Representative has failed to comprehend its approval in the light of the provisions of the very Constitution they seek to amend.

It is unfortunate that most of our Representatives never attempted to understand where ConAss lies in the Constitutional scheme of things. However, it is even more unfortunate if we resort to labels identifying ourselves as ‘Anti-ChaCha’ and placards articulating our ‘No to ConAss’ without an appreciation of the dynamics in our Constitution, however flawed it may seem to many.

Charter Change refers to either the revision or amendment of the Constitution. Amendment would refer to ‘isolated or piecemeal change only’ while revision would pertain to a ‘revamp or rewriting’ [Cruz, 1996]. Article XVII provides that both involve two (2) steps – proposal and ratification.

Constituent Assembly (ConAss) is among the modes of proposing either amendments or revisions to the Constitution. A reading of the Article would show that there are the three modes for proposing changes: (a) Constituent Assembly [Section 1 (1)]; (b) Constitutional Convention [Section 1(2)]; or (c) by a People’s Initiative [Section 2].

For the first mode, Congress – and by ‘Congress’ we mean not merely the House of Representatives but must necessarily include the Senate – may convene itself into a Constituent Assembly ‘upon a vote of three-fourths of all its Members’ [Emphasis mine.] As ConAss, the Senate and House of Representatives become a constituent body exercising special power to formulate a new constitution or propose amendments to the constitution. A caveat though, our Constitution does not explicitly state whether the two houses of Congress will be voting jointly or separately.

Congress may call for a Constitutional Convention (ConCon) ‘by a vote of two-thirds of all its Members’ or by a simple majority vote, Congress can submit the decision (on whether or not to call a ConCon) to the electorate. [Again, emphasis mine.] Under ConCon, it is imperative that the delegates to the ConCon is from a direct election by the people. The number of delegates is entirely the discretion of Congress.

Finally, proposals may also be made by our own initiative. We, the People, may directly propose amendments to the Constitution upon petition of at least 12% of all registered voters, and provided that every legislative district is represented by at least 3% of its registered voters. The last sentence in Section 2 of Article XVII makes it imperative for Congress to enact legislation to implement this provision.

Congress has the sole discretion to decide on which mode to employ in proposing changes to the Charter, save, perhaps, for the third mode on People’s Initiative. Be as it may, Article XVII makes it imperative that the product of either ConCon or ConAss must be submitted to the people for ratification through a referendum. [Section 4]

Finally, the Supreme Court, even after Congress has convened itself into a ConAss, can still strike down such measure if it appears that the conditions precedent to the convening of the ConAss was attended with ‘grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess of jurisdiction’. [Section 1, Article VIII] Hence, even if it is the sole discretion of Congress to choose which mode of proposing changes to the Charter, the Supreme Court can still come in and strike down such as unconstitutional.

In other words, while we may rage against the railroading of the ConAss resolution by our Honorable Representatives (Aside: I cringe whenever I hear them refer to themselves as ‘representatives’ – they seldom genuinely represent our interests), we must do so in the light of what the Constitution actually provides. Although we are all glad that we, as a people, are edifying ourselves (about time that we do) with the provisions of our Constitution and are engaging in healthy debates, let us not fall prey to our emotions.

The House of Representatives may have passed the resolution but such would remain meaningless if the Senate refuses to pass an equivalent resolution. Again, Mr. Speaker, without a similar move by the Senate, the resolution doesn’t mean anything and you cannot ‘convene immediately’.

Again, this is a call for sobriety. If we do not want ConAss as a mode of proposing changes to our Constitution, then let us make sure the men and women who are supposed to represent our opposition would, in fact, represent our sentiments. If not, let us turn to our Senators – Senators Arroyo and Pimentel have categorically stated that the Senate will not pass a similar resolution. If the Senate fails us, the Supreme Court has proven time and again that it heeds reason and fairness.

Yesterday, different sectors of Davao City and nearby cities and provinces converged at Freedom Park and marched to Rizal Park in order to protest the passage of HR 1109 and the so-called Constitutional Assembly of the Congress.

And like a slap on the face, one of the battlecries during the rally was this…

SHAME ON YOU CONGRESSMAN PROSPERO NOGRALES!

The Davao City Council is unanimous in fighting against Con Ass and has passed a resolution to express their indignation. Unlike “representatives” Nograles (District 1), Vincent Garcia (Dist 2), and Isidro Ungab (Dist 3), the city councilors truly represented the stand of their Davaoeño constituents. Among the councilors present during yesterday’s rally were Angela Trinidad-Librado, Myrna Dalodo-Ortiz, Tomas Monteverde III, Nilo Abellera, Pilar Braga, and Danilo Dayanghirang.

To kick off the rally, a statement from the People’s March Movement was read…

Two points against Con Ass were repeated and highlighted throughout the rally…

1. Now is not the time for a change of form of government and term extensions; and
2. No to the selling out of national patrimony via the allowing of foreign ownership of Philippine land and natural resources.

Dayanghirang pointed out that each public servant has a contract with the people. And their contract is about to expire. As a public servant, one should not go beyond or seek to extend that contract if the people does not will it.

The rally proceeded smoothly and there were policemen guarding the area. I even saw some policemen taking photos. Among the groups represented were Bayan Muna, Gabriela, the College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP), and some local colleges and universities. The crowd wasn’t as big as I anticipated, but I think we did our part in saying no to Con Ass, no to HR 1109, no to Gloria Forever and telling the Philippines that Davao is not Nograles and Nograles is not Davao! I think we lighted our own beacon of hope…

(more photos here)

Update 1: frtiz’s qik link video stream via @nicknich3 (sorry can’t seem to embed it here)

Update 2: stupendous has a feed too on his qik.

if you got more streams, @-me over at twitter and i’ll post ‘em here. cheers!

Dahil mukhang pursigido talagang itulak ang kanilang maitim na balak, siguradong magiging matindi ang protesta sa susunod na mga linggo. Nababahala ang mga lider ng simbahan at negosyo na baka kapag tumindi ang protesta ay gagamitin ni Arroyo ang kanyang mga loyalistang pulis at militar ay magdeklara ng martial law at emergency rule.

Yun lahat ay depende sa atin kung papayagan natin.

Roughly translated from the above song-and-dance vernacular:

Because it seems that they are resolved to push their dark plans, it is certain that the protests will be intense in the following weeks. Church and business leaders are worried that if the protests intensify, [President Gloria] Arroyo may resort to using her loyalist police and military forces to declare martial law and emergency rule.

That all depends on us if we allow it.

Now doesn’t that just sound so quaint in English?

You gotta hand it to the “National Language” as it seems to have this unique ability of turning hollow-brained nonsense into the kind of poetry vacuous minds feed on.

Of course it depends on us allowing it, Ellen. That’s the whole reason why we got to this point — because we’ve allowed ourselves to be suckered by the kind of “poetry” that you yourself so skillfully dish out.

And check this out: Intense protests in the following weeks? This I gotta see. If there is any schmoe in our volcanic group of islands that can ill-afford to squander their days dancing the ocho-ocho on Manila’s streets these days, it’s none other than the Average Pinoy Schmoe. Excuse me if I engage in a bit of speculation here (I’m Pinoy after all, ain’t I?), but if these ocho-ocho organisers are relying on a mob that has nothing better to do over “the following weeks”, there’s the issue of who and what is going to fill their stomachs with something to keep their knees and elbows strong enough to march while waving fists in the air.

One word comes to mind:

Hakot.

Nothing like a bit of chow to fill a busload, right? :D

Right.

But then, as the esteemed Jesuit Fr. Joaquin Bernas was reported to have said: “what the House has done is to resolve to commit a crime”.

So let me get this straight on the basis of the above quip: Doesn’t this imply that nothing wrong has been done yet?

This guy and the Inquirer Editor must both still be living in the eighties as evident in this rather laughable piece of “insight” from the same blurb:

[...] And if our lawmakers have proclaimed their intention to commit a crime, it is our duty as citizens to stop our representatives in their tracks and to warn them that there’s such a thing as citizens’ arrest, which is what People Power essentially is.

Where may I ask is this “proclamation” of an intent to “commit a crime”? Oh I forgot, our self-described “activists” and “revolutionaries” are in the business of routinely taking some poetic license in interpretting events. Tough luck. It is ironic that a favourite Tagalog saying goes like this:

Maraming namamatay sa maling akala.

Lots of people die as a result of wrong assumptions being made.

You guys wanna see a list of “assumptions” that’ve collectively turned this nation into something worse than the mere Banana Republic it started out as? Check this out — our ha-ha Hall of Shame of Ocho-Ocho “Revolutions” that has come to characterise the vacuous pride in our imagined collective “ingenuity”. What the Inquirer Editor calls our “citizen’s arrest”.

Apparently we have not learned much from our penchant for following non-thinking “visionaries”, “heroes”, and “martyrs” into moronic Street Fiestas — not even after the inventor of such moronisms herself apologised for the last successful one she led.

Though we aspire to be winners (And who doesn’t, for that matter?), we seem to prefer the path paved for us by LOSERS with the mentality to boot.

Yes indeedy;

Yun lahat ay depende sa atin.

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In computing parlance, threads are like concurrent trains of thought that a piece of software has spawned and all those result lead to a particular action whether it is opening your email client or browsing the web or displaying a particular image on your computer screen. Imagine to make your windows operating system work, or your Ubuntu Linux or your Mac OS X Leopard, countless threads are happening all at once. These threads form a tapestry. And today’s computing technology has reached a point where we have multi-cores so the problem of efficiently managing those threads is the biggest challenge. Our country, our democracy is woven by threads. One of the biggest (not biggest) is how to wove those threads to make a beautiful tapestry.

Two important things are at the center of our national debate. First, there is the question of House Resolution 1109, which mean to turn Congress into a Constituent Assembly. The Second question is, “Do we really want charter change?” I submit that those two things are very distinct and I think most people are starting to confuse the two issues. Sparks’ “Yes, 1109″ is a sad piece”.

House Resolution 1109 is a farce because first how it was made in the first place, in stealth and driven by self serving purpose. Second, the opposition to House Resolution 1109 and by extension turning Congress into a Constituent Assembly is largely because of trust issues.

“Do you really trust members of Congress— both the House of Representatives and the Senate to be knee deep into the guts of the most basic, most sacred law of the land?”

Did I hear you say, “No?”

Yeah, me too.

Let me go on a bit of segue here. Bikoy yesterday wrote about on Internet activism and protest:

Street protests are among the most accommodating and reliable forms of protests. It does not exclude anyone from participating. It accommodates anyone regardless of computer literacy, economic or social stature. History has also proven its potency in advancing the struggle of citizens for changes and reforms around the world.

As I’ve mention on twitter and on countless occasions before that, I’m very short on street protest. Here’s why: It hurts the people we want to entice to see our point of view, more than it hurts those people at the Palace or the Batasan. The traffic a street protest generates means money wasted. It means business that feeds that janitor and his family loses and that loss of revenue may or may not be what breaks the camel’s back. Why are we punishing our own? We can not win the debate when we start to exclude potential people who may be on the fence. As much as we want to be respected for our constitutional right to voice our disagreement, we must respect the constitutional right of people to work, to put food on the table and to protest in their own way.

In my humble opinion this is the time to have an “Ako Mismo” type of campaign. Why are you for or against House Resolution 1109? Why are you for or against Constituent Assembly? Why are you for or against Charter Change? What do you think we should do to change the equation? This is the time to spread the word. Fire up Youtube and send it across Friendster and Facebook. The youth isn’t apathetic. They need direction to focus their boundless energy. What we need is a society that is properly informed about the issue and that society is an open and transparent one and a true democracy.

There are other ways to mark our distaste for house bill 1109. Distaste that is very visual and inclusive. For five minutes each day, in cities across the country, in establishments from every walk of life can decide to turn off their light. Television can cover this. Radio and Print media too. That’s not all we can do. For two minutes in a day, until the matter is resolve a moment of national silence can be mobilized. Two minutes of silence to mark our cold vehemence at what this government is doing. It can be done, right?

My point is: we need to engage everyone in a positive and refreshing manner.

Moving along, I read Sparks’ poignant post:

So yes, by all means, let us welcome House Resolution 1109. Let us stand by and let “due process” run its course. Allow our honorable representatives to open up the highest law of the land for tinkering. Since we elected them, they embody the will of the people. They must have our best interests at heart. Let the system work by god! Let the open, democratic and accessible institutions of this country carry us to First World status by 2020!

I’ve mentioned in a comment to one of sparks’ post that this will not be won by street protest alone. This is the time when we must include everyone. Rich. Poor. Professional. Religious. Every. Single. Filipino. This is the time for the Integrated Bar to rise up to defend the charter. This is the time for the Makati Business Club and the Philippine Chamber of Commerce to take a stand. This is a time for the Catholic Bishops and our Muslim friends to stand shoulder to shoulder. This will eventually be decided in the Supreme Court and yes, there must be a united front to say that House Resolution 1109 and what spawns from that resolution is wrong.

The second question is: “do we really want charter change?”

I think we’ve made a mess of our democracy. The mistrust, the acid air by which we discuss national issues. The lack of rationality and our self-serving issues, sometimes don’t you want to simply start over? One clean slate with no questions ask? As Martin put it, “a hard reboot?”

Earlier I used the analogy of computing threads with our democracy. The next release of Mac OS X (which is being previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference this week) is a technology called “Grand Central Dispatch (pdf)“. This technology transfers the load of managing threads in applications and putting the operating system to do that work especially in this multicore universe.

Something similar needs to happen with the Philippines. In my humble opinion, we need to simplify and make more efficient our every complex operation.

I think a real charter change debate needs to happen. I think we should put our wisest men and our smartest minds in a room and let them debate a framework for our future. They need to consider things like “a case study of the decentralization of health and education services in the Philippines” (thanks to @mlq3 for that link) This process need not be rushed. Let them take years to study, to contemplate to draft, to debate, then come to us and say, you know what: this is what we think our road map should be. And while our wisest and smartest are in that room, the rest of us will continue to do the work we are in. If it takes two presidential elections before our wisest and smartest get back to us, then so be it. If they say, we’re good no changes, fine right? if they say these are the things we need to meet new frame conditions to better face the future with, then why not?

Survey has shown that a majority of Filipinos are not in favor of charter change. They’re saying no to something they do not understand. In my humble opinion neither the pros nor the cons have bothered to explain in none technical jargon why they stand exactly the way they do. Each side use fear and uncertainty and doubt as arguments. That’s not the proper way. If after all is said and done, it doesn’t matter if it is a yes or a no. What ultimately is most important is a decision we make with our eyes open and its failure or success is our responsibility.