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MANILA: The poem in question is "Sa Aking Mga Kabata" written in 1869 when Jose Rizal was 8 years old. Some people say, "Jose Rizal did not write that genius of a poem!" (Image is my shot from the Calamba shrine.) In response, I give you at once the original and my translation of it; if you are a genius yourself, you will find out that the Rizal bashers are no geniuses – they are all wrong! Sa Aking Mga Kabata Original by Jose P Rizal To Kids Of My Own Time  Translation by Frank A Hilario Kapagka ang baya’y sadyang umiibig sa kanyang salitang kaloob ng langit, sanlang kalayaan nasa ring masapit katulad ng ibong nasa himpapawid. 1 If the people naturally love its tongue that is a gift from Heaven, pawned freedom too it will seek to gain as the bird that flies the sky above. Pagka’t ang salita’y isang kahatulan sa bayan, sa nayo’t mga kaharian, at ang isang tao’y katulad, kabagay ng alin mang likha noong kalayaan. 2 Since language is

MANILA: What the lady in the image is doing is over-cultivating; just like on the ground in Nairobi, where La Via Campesina, an indigenous and peasant-run food sovereignty movement, is digging the field deeper in the hope of burying the World Trade Organization! "The WTO must die," Yash Tandon told the  Voice of America . "It's totally unbalanced against us" (quoted by Nadia Prupis, republished by  Films For Action , no date,  filmsforaction.org ). Tandon is the CEO of the Southern & Eastern Trade Information and Negotiations Institute. Less than murderous in intent, on his part Campesina said more or less: The WTO is aiming to strengthen a "corporate-driven free trade regime" while ignoring solutions that would protect small-scale farmers and increase food security worldwide. Ignored: Such as higher tariffs on imported goods in order to protect Campesina farmers' livelihoods. But of course. This is the World Trade Organization, re

MANILA: I have been reading about Gawad Kalinga and the Facebook sharing of "The Chicken Man Louis Faure" and inspired enough to email Tony Meloto, GK Founder, to make an offer he can't refuse, after which I will be known as The Man Who Wrote The Book On GK . Dreaming. I love it that Gawad Kalinga is helping to build "a future full of hope" (image above from the cover of the GK Annual Report 2015 ). GK is into national development, one village at a time. "At the heart of development is people," says Tony Meloto. All people. Walang iwanan. "Social Progress is about not leaving anyone behind." For the Philippines to finally rise from poverty, I'm thinking of even bigger, broader, and beautifuller Gawad Kalinga-like communities. Why GK as model? Because there is order, livelihood, residence, and many benefits of community. People need housing. More than that, they need discipline: The squatters cannot continue squatting, no matter if you ca

MANILA: What now? For all its 16,450 words, The Paris Agreement on climate change announced yesterday, Saturday, 12 December 2015, signed by 195 countries, where do we go from here? I say we must find the key. But what do we mean when we say "This is the key"? What makes what the key to whatever? Now that there is a Global Climate Change Agreement , what follows must be the Act . Let me then refer to the agreement by an acronym, Global Cat , meaning Global Climate Agreement Terms . This is a serious matter; this is now or never. The metaphor of the cat is intentional – a cat pounces on pests such as mice. All the country signatories to the Global Cat are mice, including those who did not sign. Careful now, the Global Cat is watching! Now then, the Global Cat should be able to pounce on any of the countries that turn out to be mice just scampering around looking for food, or victim. Is the Global Cat as powerful as it should be? It's not an international government, just

MANILA: For many years, I have been thinking of a super legacy, a huge-impact project that I can initiate with only me and my laptop and the Internet, and today I have it: The Supercoop. Yes, the co-op, coop, co-operative, cooperative; I just reinvented it. As I write this, the thing that has just inspired me to do it is the essay I uploaded a few minutes ago to another blog, "Farmer's Mal-Practice in the Philippines" (12 December 2015, Journalism For Science.  blogspot.com ). Specifically, the inspiration came from "Frank H's Table of Scientist's Technologies and Farmer's Practice in Rice Farming in the Philippines" where I listed 13 bad habits of Filipino farmers. Rereading the list, I had the insight that I might as well start a new blog and write a new book to help save the farmers from themselves. Did I say farmer's mal-practice? Yes, what farmers have been and still are doing wrong, some 13 of them, which I discussed in that essay

MANILA: Hacienda Luisita is a sugar plantation in Tarlac in Central Luzon; it is so large that it can accommodate both the cities of Makati and Pasig. It is owned by Martin Lorenzo and the Cojuangco-Aquino family, which includes Corazon Aquino and Noynoy Aquino (Wikipedia). Naturally, it has been the object of land reform.  On 30 September 2013, the tenants of Hacienda Luisita began receiving their individual Certificates of Land Ownership Award (CLOAs) to portions of Hacienda Luisita; the first certificate was given by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to Benigna Mañalac, 82 years old (Jo Martinez-Clemente, 01 October 2013,  newsinfo.inquirer.net ). That day, she was the first of around 600 who received their CLOAs from Agrarian Reform Secretary Virgilio De Los Reyes. The total CLOAs comprised only 390 ha of the estate; there are about 4,100 ha covered by land reform out of the 6,453 ha of Hacienda Luisita. There are 6,298 landless workers involved. The news today, Tuesday, 03 N

MANILA:  If you look at the  word cloud  above, from its own website, the World Bank is focused on  poverty   alleviation, adjustment, reduction, halving  – but  not liberation . That's a clue about how this world agency looks at solving global poverty, thinking from poor to not-so-poor. It was on 17 October 1987 when a hundred thousand people gathered at the Trocadero in Paris, "to honor the victims of extreme poverty, violence and hunger." Those gathered "proclaimed that poverty is a violation of human rights and affirmed the need to come together to ensure that these rights are respected." The Trocadero is where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in 1948. On 22 December 1992, the UN declared 17 October every year as the "International Day for the Eradication of Poverty" ( un.org/en ). So, how does the UN propose to eradicate poverty? Current patterns of production and consumption, for example, are neither meeting the current needs