I don’t know how many times I have to say this in a span of 6 months. 🙄
First of all, this undersecretary should know that it is the job of DA to help subsistence farmers find markets and transport these to those with low supply. The prices of our vegetables here in the lowlands, especially in Metro Manila, are very high that only the middle class no can afford to eat vegetables three meals a day.
God, are we that evil to be punished by having idiots in government?
I think I lost a lot of brain cells today by engaging a supporter of Manny Pinol on Twitter. No more. I should lay off news for a while. Which is ironic since I produce day in and day out.
Oh wait, I can’t quit news. I need to read about the markets every morning. Every fucking day.
Equally stressful is swapping materials for my home construction, deciding which I can dial down and which I should reinforce, like additional beams and posts. I asked the contractor to reduce the tiles on the walls of the bathroom because I want to hang art in the bathroom. Because why not?
Photo from Apartmentherapy.comPhoto from Apartmentherapy.comPhoto from Apartmentherapy.com
I asked him to make me a niche like this because I’m tired of dealing with shower caddies. This one is easier to clean.
My contractor will fabricate me this kind of stairs.
He said he can make the mid-landing wider so I can have sort of a deck. I’ll think about it first. My concern is, can a small dog manage this? And when I’m already a senior citizen, can I still manage this?
I have to keep costs down because as construction progresses, there would be hidden costs that would surprise me. And it’s quite stressful. I don’t want to skimp on quality but I don’t want to be extravagant on things that can be simplified without sacrificing structural integrity.
He will start laying down the materials in my mom’s garage by next week. Preliminary work like clearing the construction area and removing the balustrades in the existing structure etc.
It’s finally happening. OMG.
I am doing something very adult now. Building my home. I never thought I could but I’m finally doing it now. By myself. Alone. It’s so empowering.
So maybe a condo in Makati or BGC and a beach house in Anilao could be possible. My tiny house was just a dream a year ago…it’s finally coming true.
This is a big FUCK YOU to all the men who hurt me and treated me like dirt. Damn you, I am capable of so much, much more. I am more than a human appliance. I can make things happen. I can make my dreams come true. Even if it’s just small, this is mine. I am having this built by myself.
The thing is under the law, confidential funds (that don’t need to be audited by the state auditor) SHOULD only be applied to intelligence funds. There are specific uses for this kind of confidential funds and SHOULD NOT be abused for other purposes, like TRAVEL. WTF are they going to use it for during their travels???
Confidential funds may also be used to pay rewards to informers; uncover or prevent illegal activities that pose a clear and present danger to the agency, its personnel and facilities; and others that may be authorized in the General Appropriations Act.
The circular provided that the conduct of confidential activities, as far as practicable, be done in collaboration with law enforcement agencies.Confidential funds may also be used to pay rewards to informers; uncover or prevent illegal activities that pose a clear and present danger to the agency, its personnel and facilities; and others that may be authorized in the General Appropriations Act.
The circular provided that the conduct of confidential activities, as far as practicable, be done in collaboration with law enforcement agencies.
And because there is zero checks and balances in this government because everyone else is under the Marcos machinery (The House Speaker is Marcos Jr’s uncle, the deputy speaker is his son, the brainless Sandro Marcos, and Senate is basically a Duterte-Marcos upper chamber), what can you expect? Budgets are hardly deliberated on.
Good morning, Philippines! LIZA ARANETA MARCOS has a huge wardrobe budget.
And this is another thing that happened today:
For USD earners like me (but don’t give a fuck), this is good on a myopic level because you get more pesos on your dollar.
But for those who think about the bigger picture like me, this means that all goods and services are going to be a lot more expensive. We are a net importer of oil = transportation costs will be much higher. As it is, Grab is more expensive here now compared to Singapore or just about the same.
Double whammy! OMG!
This redounds to cost of food because our goods are transported by trucks, not trains. We are an archipelago so goods are either flown or shipped by vessels fed by oil, not LNG. We also import rice, flour, and other basic commodities. Even onion and garlic! And salt! It’s quite ironic the we are surrounded by millions of km of coastlines and yet we are importing salt!
Cost of power is also climbing because our base load power plants are fed by imported coal and diesel. As it is, gasoline is cheaper than diesel nowadays. And the Filipinos pay electricity through our noses because we pay market rate. Our power is not subsidized, unlike our neighbors. That’s why Indonesia’s inflation rate is artificial in the sense the true cost of goods and are not reflected in the prices that they pay for because its government is shouldering a good part of their expenses (from power to medicines) through state-owned enterprises that own own almost everything. How can you even have three state-owned pharmaceutical companies? Their train fares are subsidized. Just about everything is subsidized.
Anyway, I digress. The point here is, the peso is weakening at a faster rate than expected because it could not shadow the actions of the US Fed. The gap between the USTr and our own benchmark rates has widened, thus, hot money from emerging markets have fled faster. We couldn’t shadow the latest actions (and future actions of FOMC given their latest hawkish stance) because any sizeable rate hikes (like a 75-100-basis-point hike) would kill our very fragile economy now. The BSP has to prioritize the economy before tempering the sinking peso.
This faster fall of the peso will kill our exports as well. Why? Half of our exports is comprised of electronics and semiconductors. Traditionally, these exporters order raw materials (because we don’t process our own minerals like silicon, silver, gold, nickel, and copper) abroad around third quarter in preparation for the orders for Christmas (hello iPhones and iPads). With the way things are, the raw materials have become more expensive now. Then this makes the cost of manufacturing semicon and electronics more expensive = costlier exports.
So I will punch any Marcos apologist right smack on their face if they say that this is good for the economy and that Marcos is making us richer by making us earn more pesos to the dollar. 🙄 Spare me this stupidity. A former reporter (who is now a lawyer) messaged me about this forex thing and she told me that an uncle of her brother-in-law said that this is great and in any case Marcos will make things better because the Marcoses will bring out their gold stash (a.k.a. the mythical Tallano Gold) to help the Philippines. And the sad part here is he was being serious about it, my friend said. Then multiply that to the 31 million who voted for Marcos. This is the level of stupidity reigning over the country today.
Social media has made Filipinos more stupid.
AND THE FUCKTARD MARCOSES ARE ROBBING US RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES! Legalized stealing.
OMG 🤬
How can I even…
I need a drink.
On the brighter side of life, my 10-hour nilaga is stupendous!
Lots of veggies and peppercorns. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The soup is 👌 *chef’s kiss*
I’m keeping the broth again for future dishes like pho or some egg noodle dish? Ramen? Soba? I can’t wait for my Instant Pot so I can experiment with new dishes I can cook with it.
With my reporter friend who interviewed me this morning.
So yesterday was so exhausting. It took me several days before I finished my car registration with the Land Transportation Office, at its headquarters.
I spent x number of hours queuing at LTO Main but a lot of people got stuck there and some had been going back and forth there for days (just like me, albeit at a different LTO satellite branch), which ate up productivity. In some cases these people lost income for the day/s.
Why is it taking so long?
It’s because the IT system had been going down for days. The entire LTO system has been going offline—nationwide—for several days now.
Because of this, people that had been applying for their car registration are getting stranded. The process has been/is still crawling.
This is how chaotic the LTO office had been yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Some applicants had left after spending the entire day at the LTO but I refused to budge. I didn’t leave LTO until somebody attended to my application because DAMN IT, I’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR A WEEK NOW!
I was told that the inspection and stenciling of the serial number of my car had to be redone because it was done in another LTO office. I was like, “WTF!!! It’s not even my fault that LTO @20th Ave Cubao just packed up and left without warning to the public!”
I didn’t budge, I didn’t leave the premises until an inspector did the entire bullshit again. And I began tweeting the process, the issues, and the instances of people leaving their posts at 4 pm.
It was 4:01 pmand no one was around anymore to help us just because they couldn’t encode our papers because the “system was down”. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
One inspector said, he couldn’t do his job of doing the stenciling—his reason for being—because the people in the cubicle above didn’t say I can proceed. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! Those guys just didn’t want to do their work and left their posts!
I continued to tweet and tag the Twitter account of LTO central office about my very public ordeal.
Long story short, I finished it because I was adamant at pushing for my right as a citizen.
I was so frustrated with the entire thing that I posted a video monologue of my ordeal on Instagram.
So the next day, this reporter-friend messaged me on Viber about my tweets that were forwarded to her by some LTO people because they said whatever I tweeted were true.
We chatted and agreed that she will drop by and have the interview outside my apartment—along the avenue where we’re at. I was still in my sleepwear and my reporter-friend said that I should put on makeup because this will be an on-cam thing. HAHAHA, talk about pressure.
So to sum it up:
As I said in the interview with ABS-CBN, the problem is the entire system. It was a grave problem—the issue is about the service provider. Apparently STRADCOM is no longer the IT service provider for quite some time and shouldn’t even be there (but wait, STRADCOM still has a window there!) because they were already replaced by a German IT company. But LTO says they *couldn’t* turn over the database to the new IT provider, saying it was *difficult*. So this tug-of-war between the very old IT provider and the new, no non-sense Germans is causing outages in the IT system. Which affected the whole nation because the system outages are all over the Philippines. Every LTO branch is OFFLINE!
And to us reporters, we already know why.
Of course, I couldn’t say it outright that this is caused by corruption. The very inefficient STRADCOM leaves a lot of room for fixers and cash-related items that can fall through the cracks. The rank-and-file up to the high officials get their cuts from the fixers. This is also the reason why there are a lot of dumbass drivers on the road—even those who couldn’t drive can get registered or get their licenses because of fixers.
Once the German company takes a complete hold of the IT system, the entire LTO process will be efficient and accurate. NO room for grease money. Payment system can expand beyond the cashiers of LTO offices and they can tap other payment gateways like what SSS and other government agencies do. Imagine, they couldn’t even process credit card/debit card payments; everything has to be cash basis. If the German company has settled everything, the car registration and drivers license renewal can be done under an hour. No need for long lines, no need for fixers.
DAMN IT.
In the interview, I said this process shouldn’t even take a couple of hours and this shouldn’t even be done every year. In other countries, these are done every xxx number of years and only the old vehicles should inspected regularly for road worthiness. But everything should be done online.
UNFORTUNATELY, the LTO story did not air tonight. Probably it was bumped off by more time-sensitive and mass-oriented matters like the senate hearing on rice shortage/prices and the impending increase in rice prices. I understand that it is beyond the reporter’s control since I am also in the news business and I had been with a TV network too.
My desk and new keyboard before the keycap change yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Good thing I had some distraction because I was so angry. Because my newish mechanical keyboard is so tactile and cute, I was inspired to finish my job even though I was already boiling and ready to kill.
New keycaps arrived. Something that cheered me up yesterday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
And today, I was on a Thursday chill mode to drive away the bad jujus of the previous day.
The latest Chromecast. Photo by CallMeCreayion.com
I chose to be happy while being reasonable. This thing is only PHP 2,800 and it transformed my decade-old TV into a smart TV with all the streaming apps you can install on that pebble-like thing you call Chromecast. I upgraded my second-generation Chromecast to this one instead of buying a new smart TV that costs PHP20,000, if I’m lucky. My LG TV still works perfectly fine and I have no reason to dump it. When we transfer to my new home, I will just mount the TV on the wall and dress it up like a picture frame and have artworks stream via this device (you can choose the kind of artworks you can display). I will have a gallery wall around the old TV so it won’t be obtrusive.
The old Chromecast will be given to my mom so she’s not limited to her laptop anymore when binge-watching Netflix. She has a TV that swivels so she can watch on her bed.
Ah tomorrow, we will be chasing a lot of executives in a hotel where a conference is now ongoing. Good luck to Friday driving madness.
Sushi is hiding from the twins. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My cats, aside from wanting to be with me, go to my room during the day to escape my Demolition Twins. Here we have Sushi hiding behind my curtains. She wants to be with me but invisible to the human twins.
Why?
Because this is what they do to the cats.
Look at Kimchi’s face. 🤣 Photo by CallMeCreation.comKimchi’s taray look. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
This afternoon I attempted to finish my car registration at LTO @20th Avenue in Cubao. Ehhhhhhhhh…they started dismantling the office because they’re transferring to a new building. Ergo, I will be delayed by another day. So I went to LTO Ali Mall in Araneta Center and it turns out it’s only for drivers license renewal. 😫
Damn it.
It was already past 5 pm so there’s no point in going to LTO at P. Tuazon Ave or at LTO main along East Ave. I have to go to the main office tomorrow to get this over and done with.
To make my parking fee at the mall worth it, I decided to buy some stuff that I always forget to buy, like a new desktop mirror. This is my third mirror and the first two were broken by my cats. 🐈 Talk about having a Demolition Twins 2.0
Only PHP 189, a lot cheaper than the Ikea mirror that Sushi tipped over and cracked. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Speaking of twins, we are now having twin typhoons—and one is a super typhoon. Look at that clear eye in the middle that is fast approaching southern Japan. The more pronounced the eye is, the stronger the typhoon.
Both Tropical Depression Gardo and Super Typhoon Hinnamnor, which would be named Henry when it enters the Philippine Area of Responsibility, are unlikely to make landfall. Rappler.com
Although these may not make landfall in the Philippines, the two weather disturbances may pull each other and cause a lot of heavy rainfall as they could draw the monsoon rains from southwest towards northeast (the swirls are an indication of that). Diving could be dangerous as the currents would become stronger and more unpredictable.
Heavy rainfall is something that should be taken seriously in the Philippines, as proven by Tropical Storm Ondoy (Typhoon Ketsana) in 2009 that wreaked havoc in Metro Manila. Ketsana wasn’t even a typhoon; it was just a tropical storm based on the wind velocity. However, the amount of rainfall was unprecedented. Ondoy dumped a month’s worth of rainfall in just six hours hours (455 mm of rain within 24 hours = several months’ worth of rainfall). I remember I was about to go to my hometown that day but after reaching the subdivision gate, the floodwaters were already half my car tire. I quickly turned back. Good thing I did because a lot of people were caught off-guard by the sudden rise in floodwaters. It was a Saturday and countless people were stuck in their cars on the road. Katipunan Ave was completely submerged as Marikina River burst its banks. One reporter told me she was driving back home when she got stuck on the road because her home in Manila was like Waterworld. She spent 24 hrs in her car, I think.
So we were stranded in Cainta for days as the water reached neck-deep in our subdivision while in some parts of Cainta the water level was way above our heads. Marikina was underwater.
We tried getting out of Cainta through some back channels that were a bit dry but first we needed to push my car through the floodwaters in the subdivision. I needed to get to work because my boss shouldn’t be manning the desk alone (I was already an assistant business editor then). Because when disaster strikes, we journalists cannot NOT work.
We spent about two (or three?) weeks in my sister’s condo in Mandaluyong before the flood in Cainta subsided.
Several months after Ondoy, I still had emergency provisions in my car trunk like rain boots, food, extra clothes, flash light, emergency lamp, etc. The following year, we transferred to Quezon City and we made sure the place is never flooded. Every time it rained heavily, my anxiety levels go through the roof. This is why I always check NOAA Western Pacific satellite images to predict the weather and plan my activities accordingly. Blame Ondoy.
This was sent to me by my older sister as she warned us siblings about two recent attempted abduction cases in our small hometown. And to think I had allowed Twin A this weekend to walk alone to buy something just outside the campus.
The case above is one abduction attempt near the university campus.
This is the recent video of the interview with the victim, she was relating to the barangay officials how she avoided being forced into a white van.
Before the pandemic, there was a spate of reports about white vans abducting children and these were linked to rape/organ harvesting. This can just be urban legends but there were reports of children’s corpses found along creeks without major organs.
According to the grapevine the kidnapped children/harvested organs are flown to China, given that the amount of money rich parents pay to save their only child (as a result of one-child policy before they loosened it) is astronomical. Although this has not been established yet, there are anecdotal evidence of organ harvesting happening in provinces before Covid.
The Philippines has an international reputation as one of the global hotspots for organ trafficking. In 2007, it was named as one of the organ-exporting countries in the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) report, along with India, Pakistan, China, Egypt and Colombia.
Similar reports were published in Latin America, with adults being kidnapped and organs harvested. The United Nations has been after this grisly crime, but these reports are largely ignored as they are relegated to urban legend status.
Philippine Senate has investigated the alarming rate of child kidnappings related to organ harvesting but it has gone nowhere. It only died down a bit because of Covid but now they’re back.
I had been keeping my old phone and a basic smart phone in my drawer to give my girls after they take the entrance exams. But because of these alarming reports, I immediately gave the phones to the girls today so I can track them down (through a geo-location app) and have a means to call them, especially when I’m away. Well, that was the main reason why I was set to give them phones: they would soon be junior high schoolers and they would be commuting to school on their own. I’d rather have peace of mind that the girls have some kind of protection and I can monitor them than worry about the negative effects of mobile phones. They are already more mature now—a far cry from what they were when J met them in 2018. They are more responsible now and are easier to discipline. Without prodding from me, they had been doing study groups with their friends remotely and I can hear/watch them during some of their study sessions.
They also had been working hard on their review school.
I think it’s time that they can be given phones so I can call them every now and then. Or they can call me if something was amiss.
I will also buy them pepper sprays, stun guns, and whistles (as a high school classmate suggested) that they should always bring in their bags or pockets.
Meanwhile, it’s traditional for mainstream media to report about the problems of public school education every time the school year starts. I had produced special reports about these when I was still working for a newspaper. But I went beyond the usual classroom shortage and ill-equipped teachers. I focused on indigenous people and the lack of support from the national government and the malnutrition among Filipino school children. I also reported about the high worm infestation among school children in the Philippines and my research brought me to UNDP to talk/write about this.
I reported such things not to antagonize the Department of Education but to shed light on a systemic problem.
These journalists who shined on the misguided focus of Sara Duterte (bringing back ROTC instead of addressing the lack of facilities and learning resources, really???) are now getting attacked. It prompted me to defend them on Twitter.
Being a journalist in this country in the time of Duterte and Marcos is really a dangerous job. Not only security-wise but also our mental health hangs on a balance. Our jobs require us to be active on social media but then being on social media kills us softly.
And here we go again:
Marcos and his cronies are really out there to kill ABS-CBN.
It’s so stressful today. I wish I could just shut out the world and not read news but that’s impossible because I’m in the business of news production and I always have to be on top of all important news not only in the Philippines, but also in Asia. Like we have upcoming national elections in Malaysia while Softbank is set to exit Alibaba. I start the day reading general and business news (I have two subscriptions) and checking Twitter for breaking news.
By 12 noon I’m already a mass of nerves.
Thank goodness for my comical cats.
Kimchi sitting on my Ipad again 🙄My Lazada order came with a cat
I’m about to check out from Lazada/Shopee some pepper sprays, stun guns, whistles, mechanical keyboards, and key caps 😂
