The Fat Man Today

Yesterday’s public senate hearing was pretty much an exercise in futility. Some of the questions of the senators were misleading at best, and while I abhor Jamby Madrigal to hell and back, she probably asked some of the more decent questions. It was, at best, a media circus that pretty much reached its climax when the senators called in Kho, Belo’s representative, and Katrina Halili in for questioning. That was when an ex-policeman, in righteous indignation, dumped water on top of Hayden Kho. I don’t really care about the hearing itself. Kho could rot in jail for all I care, and I still think that Halili’s playing the damsel in distress role to the ground. But this stupid series of events is important in that it is a portent of how the Philippine government is finally going to react to Web 2.0 and the free flow of information in the modern world. See, the most basic problem here is that within weeks, the video of Kho was made accessible to millions of Pinoys throughout the world ...

A couple of posts ago , I mentioned the Great Book Blockade of 2009. When I first read about this, I was just like everybody else in thinking that it was all about the government making another quick buck, except that this was money made from information that was supposedly an easily accessible commodity. Needless to say, I thought it was stupid, and proceeded to share it throughout the Internet community. This was during the early days of the book blockade. The only people who’ve made mention of it was the origin source and Manuel L. Quezon III . And then the news hit the fan, and Facebook and Twitter got into the picture. A disclaimer: I am not for the book blockade. I am also against any and all illegal forms of taxation. I believe that the government needs to make money, but the gargantuan amount of money involved in the salary of government heads is ridiculous. You want more money? Cut back on positional salaries, and spread out the corresponding backwash to the rest of the e...

I was listening to the radio this morning, and these disk jockeys from DWRT were going through their usual morning yakkety yak. You know. Stuff you usually don’t listen to, stuff that becomes white noise. But when they started talking about the Hayden Kho stuff, it took all of my self-control to keep myself from tossing my laptop out of the window (yes, I was streaming from the ‘net). You know how it is – the reason people listen to the radio en route to work is to serve as background music. Sooner or later, you just let it stream through your senses. Just like the Hayden Kho scandal(s). The entire thing is just really absurd, and Nina pointed out that the only reason the press is cashing in on this is because unlike previous sex scandals, this involved a rather upstanding member of Philippine society. What I can’t get enough of, though, is the way everybody is handling the entire situation. The media’s trying to be as invasive as possible to get the “truth” out. En route to th...