Killer Dog

We got our dog yesterday, a German Sheppard puppy, two months old. It's parents are big, its feet are big, and it is already bigger than many of the local dogs. The dog's name is Shaq. He can already intimidate people, standing his ground and barking. He doesn't back up. He's mastered the command "sit" and will soon fill out his vocabulary with heel, lay down, up, down, stay, come, sic 'em, and kill.

He'll be invited to practice his last word, and skill, on people who drop in without notifying us ahead of time. Or the snakes that slither in at night through the water drainage channels.

He has his vaccinations.

Philippine Dog

I grew up with these dogs. In the States they are commonly referred to as "police dogs" because they are so popular with police departments. They are smart, discern threats well, are aggressive if necessary, have a good nose and are good with kids and people in general. They only bark when there is cause.

Now before I train the dog, I have to train up the wife on what a civilized dog is all about. The dogs around the Philippines are different. Their main purpose is to dispose of garbage. They are seldom tended to, have zero vocabulary, almost never see veterinarians, are seldom bathed, are generally laden and suffering with fleas, often have mangy skin diseases, and once in a while end up on a poor family's dinner plate. They breed like rabbits, having intercourse in the middle of the road or even in the school yard, and there is no pedigree except multiple cross-breed mutt.

Their entertainment is to kill motorcyclists by darting out onto the National Highway and getting run over.

They are not exactly the smartest dogs in the universe.

Here's what my first lesson for the wife went like:

"Babe, Shaq is a real dog. If you treat him right, become his friend and master, he will die for you.  He will get between you and any threat. He will sacrifice himself to protect you."

She put down her fork and gave me her full attention.

"But you can't treat him like a 'thing", or even like an animal. You need to treat him better than most Filipinos treat their kids. (She knows I dislike deadbeat fathers who abandon their kids, mothers who pass their kids off to other people, the general lack of nurturing that is common in the Philippines, and taking advantage of kids by making them give money to the family)."

She frowned.

"He must be bathed regularly, fed nutritious foods, given proper vaccinations, and given lots of affection. Affection is the key. The dog will express affection, too. When he gives gentle bites, he is playing, as he would with a brother or sister. When he licks your hand or arm, he is kissing you. Let him express affection. Don't tell him 'no' when he licks you. He is doing all that he can do to show you that he loves you."

She stopped frowning.

Only you and I are allowed to train the dog. We don't want your brothers or mama or anyone else giving mixed messages or sloppy discipline to the dog. And we want to preserve our place as masters.

She nodded and said "okay".

"Spend time with the dog. Just sit with him. Talk to him. Pet him, aggressively. You must let him know that you are the master dog."

She giggled.

"That's all for today."

She smiled and picked up her fork.

The Philippines: A Nation with One Foot on the Brake

This slipped out of my cranium the other day, and it is bugging me. It describes a characteristic of a great many Filipinos:

• " It is strange that the strengths that are important to generating wealth are the ones that are torn down by those who can’t acquire those strengths. "

The comment "backward nation" is an insult. Yet, this trend among Filipinos - the criticizing of people who have the strengths the Philippines needs - most certainly drives the nation backwards. A young person who aspires to achieve something in his life is ridiculed ("Ambisyoso"). A kid who speaks English well is ridiculed. A youngster who is bold, but slips and falls, is ridiculed. A kid who criticizes wrong-doing is criticized back ("Reklamador").

Ridicule is a skill set among youth in the Philippines. And it forms the groundwork for the envy and hostilities and "tear-down thinking" that will emerge in adulthood.

I lay the blame for the condition of the Philippines, the poverty and the failure to compete, upon three institutions:

The Catholic Church, which promotes unrestrained birthing when the nation does not have the means to feed the crying, hungry mouths that are birthed. Furthermore, Church is the number one example in the world of an organization that accepts zero responsibility for anything at all.

The Department of Education, which sees education as memorization of things rather than getting kids to understand the "soft knowledge" of vision, aspiration, creativity, organization, discipline and honor. It teaches young people how to be narrow and avoid risk; it does not teach them how to expand and be bold and achieve.

Parents, who fail to grasp that wealth blossoms when one's kids are nurtured and taught to reach, rather than cuffed aside and "used" to take care of mama and papa.

If you pick up a twist of anger from the harshness of my words, you are perceptive, and correct.

The Church, which could do so much for the well-being of the Philippines, fails to do anything but give solace to the suffering masses. Never mind that much of the suffering comes from Church values transmitted into such acts as vociferous opposition to the well-being of women (HR and Divorce bills).

The Department of Education, which should represent the genius of mankind, instead represents a nation that dumbs down its kids by stuffing them 45 to a classroom, wields unremitting authority which stifles initiative and innovation, and fails to promote a vision of education as something that reaches for the new rather than memorizes the old.

The Parents, who could do so much to teach principles of generosity and courtesy and determination to succeed, instead teach kids to "shut up and do what you are told." And they often use ridicule to get their message across.

Ridicule. The need to tear others down to raise oneself up. The easy way to argue. The easy way to solve problems: lay them at someone else's feet.

It is a driving force in Philippine society. It is like driving with one foot on the gas pedal and one foot on the brake.

Ridicule is the brake.

You don't compete well, don't win many races for "wealth", that way.

And it's not kind.

The Proof is in the Chief Justice's Pudding

I have come up with a judgment on Chief Justice Corona ahead of the Senate. It is in the best interest of the nation that he not continue as Chief Justice. If conviction is required to make him see this light, then conviction it needs to be.

Impeachment is a political process, a part of the pushing and shoving, balancing and checking, that goes on every day, much as congressmen plod to the podium to give their privilege speeches. Pushing and shoving, balancing and checking.

The overriding concern ought to be what is best for the nation. Not what is legalistically best for Mr. Corona. I say legalistically rather than legally because it recognizes that the winning of a court argument can be done on technicalities, rather than a clear judgment of right over wrong. Although laws are intended to instruct us on right or wrong, they can be manipulated or twisted or used to obscure the truth. Just as the citing of foreign banking laws enables Mr. Corona to hide his dollar assets, which are key to understanding his SALN.

 

If Mr. Corona continues on the job, it will show the international community that the Philippines remains a pit of irresolvable dysfunction. A place ripe with hidden motive and trickery and corruption. A nation unable to chart a path to candor and honesty and trustworthiness. In other words, the nation will continue to bear the stigma of banana republic, one general short of the next coup.

Many object to my coming to a conclusion before the defense has presented its case. Or they say "show me the facts, show me the proof!"

I argue that hunting for facts outside a construct into which they belong is rather useless. It is commonly done in the Philippines, the place where trees are cut one at a time until there is no forest. And I am not talking about wood alone. I am talking about government fees, for instance. When importers are exporters are assigned fees that make sense in isolation but in a bigger view combine with other fees and burdensome practices to suppress trade. I'm talking about customs duties on personal goods that force Filipinos to be come the laughing stock of the traveling world, packing their big boxes to the brim and carting them onto the passenger flight, converting an airplane into a dangerous, overloaded cargo flight and raising ticket prices for everyone.

I am talking about a party-man's loud music, which is justified for the single celebration, but not when put in the context of everyone doing the same thing and making sleep and healthy living impossible for the community.

And facts are not just statistics laying around. They are sometimes the process by which numbers are combined. It is a fact that when you add two and two, the process will get you get four.

It is a fact that transparency does not mean revealing a pile of unintelligible numbers that neither attorneys nor accountants nor the principal himself can explain with clarity. Transparency indeed means clarity, and Mr. Corona has not been transparent. He is hiding his dollar assets, too. He says he will report them. When? After sufficient time has passed that he can make up a story as to where the money came from? Get all his cohorts on the same page of the story? Get his documentation prepared or shredded?

 His stance on impeachment, even the use of a dozen attorneys to represent his case, as if he cannot simply step to the microphone and speak candidly, calmly and informationally, does not engender trust. And the fact is, the Chief Justice of the land should epitomize trust. He should be the most stalwart, trustworthy, honorable legal mind in the country. It is an explicit job requirement.

Mr. Corona does not meet the criterion.

No argument the defense can put up will convince me that this man is the best the Philippines can do.

He is a pride-bound man, and such pride is not honorable in the context of a nation that needs humility and candor. He is not a man of perspective and calm rationality. He is a guy who writes letters emotionally attacking President Aquino, requiring his attorneys to tell him "shut up".

The sole principle for employment anywhere ought to be to hire the most competent person for the job, not a friend or family member of person to whom favor is owed or from whom favor is expected. The Philippines should do this, or stop whining about its poverty and its corruption and its privileged oligarchs.

You can do that famous T-analysis. On the left side of the T list the pros of a different guy on the job. On the right side of the T list the cons of a different guy on the job. We end up listing the security and reputation of the nation against the desire for one man to have a job. Mr. Corona can have numerous jobs. He has contacts and presumably skills. He is not desperate for this one. But the nation is desperate for professionalism and transparency and a huge effort to hunt down corruption. It does not need roadblocks. It does not need more mistrust in its top government jobs. Keeping on a man who means "favor" to many, whether in deed or simply reputation, is foolish.

This nation does not need friends or family or famous people in important offices. Or the wives of ex-dictators. This nation does not need a tele-drama government. It needs professionalism.

So let the attorneys hack at the trees for several more weeks. Let the Senators stare at the wood shavings and try to piece together something that makes sense.

What makes sense to me is for the collective government to find a Chief Justice of impeccable standing who will represent the Philippines as a first-class country. To do less would be a shame.

The Philippines should find the means to escape the idea that it is a beggar nation of excuse mongers, hidden motive and sloppy self-dealing. And of incompetence in its highest governmental positions. It is a fact that most of the outer world views the Philippines as a banana republic, a nation that can't get its law abiding act together, a nation that endlessly falls short of expectations.

You either change that or continue doing the same things.

You either start a new trend of hiring for competence or you continue to muddle along as one of the world's most relentlessly disappointing banana republics.

That's a fact.

The Chicken Eating Snake

My yard has an ecology and it is not kind.

Our home sits on a long, easy slope, closer to the mountains than the city. It is surrounded by terraced rice fields but some of the land has been abandoned. So it has the typical collection of trees and vines and exotic plants that probably dine on stray Americans.

We put hollowblock walls around the place to keep large two-legged creatures at bay. Here and there at the base of the hollowblocks are iron grilles that permit natural waterflow to come in and out of the property without washing either us or the neighbors into the Biliran Straits.

The center of the property is largely grass with some tall trees. It is park-like, quite delightful and fun for mowing and chopping and raking of leaves. The west side of the property is a vertical garden. There is some tall shit there. Like timber bamboo and trees with leaves the size of small umbrellas and fan palms and jack fruit trees, which are the perverts of the fruit family, I figure.  They grow watermelon-sized fruit on their trunks. Boy is that bizarre.

I don't go to the west side of the property at night.

A killer snake hunts there. He is poisonous, kills his prey then sucks the head off.

Yes.

I know.

It's gruesome.

As I said, it is not kind.

So far, we've wracked up the carcasses of three rats, two lizards and my brother-in-law's young fighting chicken. Same MO, as Sherlock Holmes would observe. Dead. No head.

Now all these creatures play some role in the ecology of the yard. The rats keep the population of bigger bugs under control. You know, those cockroaches four inches long. The kind you can hear as they tromp across the kitchen counter. The lizards help in that regard, and the frogs. And the snake evidently keeps all the mid-sized creatures from overrunning the place.

We have a lot of frogs. They aren't very bright. They are fat and warty and mostly just sit there thinking you can't see them. Nevermind that they are on the terrace and not in the jungle. One hopped up and peed on my wife's foot and now she is horrified that she might get warts on her toes.

As I said, it is not kind.

Also helping in the bug control department are these little birds, swallows I suppose, that dart in and out through the trees right at face level. They are like a video game gone mad and one is inclined to fall into the same kind of trance watching them dart about.

Lots of other birds hang out, including that one asshole that keeps yelling "fire in the boat, fire in the boat" all day long long. I like the whooper. It goes "whoop whoop whoop" like a broken bassoon in heat. And it is answered by a whooper from way over there.

The neighbor's chickens march through the water grilles like they owned the place. Mama hen guides her chicks through digging for this bug and that.

You know, as I write this, I must acknowledge that the Philippines certainly has a lot of bugs. They dine on each other, too. My wife shrieked one day as she was cleaning out the wasp nests on the iron window panes. A huge centipede-like worm had crawled inside to dine on the baby wasps.

As I said . . .

Now the wasps alone are worthy of note. They are huge black critters about two inches long. Shaped a little like a woman, now that I reflect on it. Big of chest and big of butt. But their legs are less than glamorous. Skinny and shot. And they have a few extras, compared to women. These bugs could be used by the military as spy planes if they could get them to fly right. They might even be able to pack a missile or two.

And I won't talk about those leggy worms because there is only so much creepiness I am willing to put into a blog that kids might accidentally stumble upon.

But enough of this.

Back to the ecology of a Senate courtroom  . . .

The Incidental Ideologue

It seems to me that we are all frequently angered by the stupidity of other people. That is amusing considering most people are not stupid, nor are they bad people.

But half the voting population of the United States does not like the American President all that much. They would throw him out of office if someone who represented a better choice came along.

An increasing number of Filipinos also don't care for President Aquino, even though the economy is fine, defense is stronger than before, and the corrupt are increasingly hiding out.

Both provide stabilizing leadership for their nations after a period of turmoil. In the U.S., the turmoil was economic, brought on by Bush fiscal mismanagement (cutting taxes while funding two wars off budget) and regulatory malfeasance (poorly regulated mortgage risks). In the Philippines, the turmoil was brought on by the trickery of the Arroyo administration which allowed corruption to flourish and culminated in a failed midnight raid on the Constitution, presumably to extend her term in office.

So both President Obama and President Aquino entered office with voters expecting they would do something about the problems, and do it quickly.

And both presidents set about that task.

But you don't turn a nuclear aircraft carrier on a dime, and you don't turn a used coast guard cutter on a centavo. Along the way, both presidents made mistakes. Obama inserted himself into a race issue between a black professor and white police. Aquino oversaw a botched bus massacre.

Now neither of these incidents is material in the grand scope of things. But each incident upset a certain segment of the population, and those people decided they no longer liked this President.

Then the next incident came along. And the next. And then the grand, unrightable trend came along.

• For Obama, the failure to bring down the unemployment rate drove the unemployed  . . . almost 10 percent of the population, and their families and friends . . . to conclude "anybody but this guy". Never mind that President Obama brought the planet back from the edge of financial collapse on the strength of his charisma alone.

• For Aquino, his attack on corruption irritated a lot of powerful people, because powerful people in the Philippines are corrupt. So they have been attacking back, from former presidents to priests to retired generals stirring up coup talk. Never mind that investment rating agencies have upgraded the Philippines and investors are now looking for opportunities here.

The beauty of democracy is also its weakness. The beauty is that everyone is entitled to express his opinion. The weakness is that the cacophony of opinion generates a relentless undermining of the Presidency. Thereby weakening the state.

If Obama were Stalin, does anyone in the room think Iran would be so full of bluster? If Aquino were Marcos, does anyone in the room think Chief Justice Corona would have a job?

So in democracy, we are entitled to our opinions, and we hang our opinions on specific incidents that strike us wrongly.

We don't focus on good achievements for, after all, we EXPECTED those. No, we zero in on the incidents in which the President "failed us".

And for some, we quickly go ballistic, go to the wall, go to black and white instead of gray. "What an idiot!" "That socialist Obama." "Aquino is incompetent."

Anyone with an incidental axe to grind paints the President "bad" in one bold ideological stroke.

From one incident, to a broad, largely erroneous, conclusion.

We become the incidental ideologue.

We judge the house by the color of the door. We toss the book based on the design of the cover. We don't eat the pancit because it has red peppers in it.

The reason we do this is because we can't "let go" of the things that peeve us. We view the Presidential mistakes as an insult to us, personally. As if all President Obama or President Aquino had to do were worry about what is important to us.

It is back to the trust issue I wrote about a while back. Trust is so hard to build and so easily undermined. But trust engages two people. The one to be trusted, and the one who must sacrifice a little of himself to let the other guy do things his way.

So I rather think the problems in the U.S. or in the Philippines have very little to do with the Presidents of the two countries.

The problems have to do with us, with our outrageous expectation that the President is in office to cater to us, personally. And any small divergence from our personal expectation is worthy of our total condemnation.

We aren't very loyal, are we?

We aren't very dependable, are we?

We are not very trusting, are we?

To anyone who so easily . . . on the basis of isolated incidents  . . . condemns a fundamentally decent man with one of the most intricate and challenging jobs on the planet, I'd say, wow, what Ego you have, or personal agenda. What outrageously unrealistic expectations you have. How obsessive-compulsive you are, not to give your President some wiggle room.

You are in a foxhole with the President and you aren't willing to watch his back?

Who, exactly, is the problem here?