Pinoy Facts

2016 will seat a new Philippine president. Will we learn our lessons or will incompetent and corrupt presidents continue to seat on that ill-fated chair. It seems no matter who gets elected, one way or another some people will always find something to complain about it. Why not try to make the best decision on the onset by voting not from the heart. How many of us are actually trying to have a thorough understanding of what makes these candidates tick? How many of us are trying to understand the ills of our country today independent of our own personal woes? And how many of us are actually thinking through whether promises made prior to elections are doable or not? Presidential debates are not to see whether a candidate is articulate or not. It is to see whether their platforms actually make sense and whether they have a clear idea of what they are going to do to solve the issues that plague our country. Some promise that they are the answer to the problem of unemployment, p...

There are a bunch of stuffs that used to be taboos in Philippine society until they became popular abroad and considered the thing to have or be. This is one of those things that illustrate what is generally known as the Filipino colonial mentality. Wearing tattoos Before Hollywood embraced the tattoo culture it has already been part of Filipino pre-hispanic society. In the Visayas we had the pintados or painted people. Pre-spanish Filipinos used tattoos to recount their prowesses in war or simply to decorate their bodies for aesthetic purposes much like the celebrities are doing now, be it in Hollywood or locally. Years after the Spanish era and after the subsequent colonization of the islands by countries like the US and Japan, much of this culture has disappeared. It came to a point when having a tattoo marked somebody as someone who was incarcerated and served time in prison. In recent years however, when Filipinos started seeing prominent Hollywo...

  Once upon a time the Philippines used to be the place to be in Southeast Asia. Our neighbors used to envy our bustling economy, the seeming prosperity and the glimpse of the future that we represented for them. Years later, after almost 20 years of dictatorship and what felt like a hundred years of corruption, cronyism and seating leaders of varying degrees of greed and ineptitude, the P hillipines is now left eating the dust of our rapidly progressing neighbors. But is the Philippines really poor? Or are we only poor because it seems more profitable being poor. "India is not a poor country. It's a poorly managed country", a comment made by William Bissel, managing director of Fabindia, as reported by Times magazine on its January 22, 2010 issue. Furthermore he believes that poverty should not be measured by income but by access to water, food, medicine, education, a...