MANILA: Many Philippine nationalists don't realize this, but the US conquered us Filipinos with American English 100 years ago; today, you may not have noticed, but this puny country of ours already has begun conquering the world with American English. In fact, the conquest started 13 years ago, and it's global in scale. Will Manuel Luis Quezon turn in his grave?

Thinking local and acting local, Pinoy nationalists have always insisted on a Tagalog-based national language, and I have always insisted on an English-based national language for the Philippines. More than 50 years ago, in the late 1960s, during those radical years at the University of the Philippines, on campus my fellow alumni activists would speak in Tagalog and I would speak in English. I always felt at ease reading, writing and speaking in English, since high school. I wasn't thinking of colonialism, only of communication.

Now I'm thinking of call centers in the Philippines where your English is as good as cash. We learn from Philippine pioneer American Andy Sarakinis that it was only 13 years ago when the call center industry in the Philippines was yet in its infancy (Camille Bersola, "An interview with C3 executive," 2 March 2014, Philippine Star print edition, page C1; I can't find it in the online edition). The same was true of the business process outsourcing (BPO). After the year 2000, what happened over the years was phenomenal, according to Andy. It wasn't so much of a leap of faith but so much more of leaps and bounds.

Fast forward. In 2011, the New York Times called Manila the "New Capital of Call Centers" (Vikas Bajaj, 25 November 2011, nytimes.com). That year, the Philippines overtook India as the call center capital of the world. Vikas says:

Over the last several years, a quiet revolution has been reshaping the call center business: the rise of the Philippines, a former United States colony that has a large population of young people who speak lightly accented English and, unlike many Indians, are steeped in American culture.

As of 2011, the number of call center agents is already 400,000 Filipinos in the Philippines and only 350,000 Indians in India. Note that India has 10 times the population of the Philippines, which means that all the world loves American English – and Filipino call center agents. And Pinoys typically earn more than their Indian counterparts at the entry level, $300 a month vs $250. As of December 2013, the suggested rates per month are $450-$750 for General Virtual Assistant, $400-$600 for Article & Content Writer, $600-$800 for SEO & Web Marketer, and $600-$1,400 for Web Developer (Chris Ducker, chrisducker.com).

The world is paying Filipinos to work for them because of their American English. Isn't this taking advantage of colonialismthat you can't do anything about anymore anyway? You cannot rewrite history, but you can write it.

I was surfing Facebook the other day and when I came to the webpage of my son Jomar, who has embarked on a journey of training Virtual Assistants anywhere they are in the Philippines as long as they are connected to the Internet in their own homes, a thought flashed through my head:

Virtual Assistants are the reverse overseas Filipino workers that we can make millions of to make billions for the country.

Jomar has been successful in raising local-global VAs and continues to do so. While Pinoy OFWs continue to multiply, I believe there are a million more chances for Pinoys to land a contract with a foreign institution or individual because of our well-known talent in American English, competent use of information technologies, and knowledgeable use of social media.

Why do people hire Virtual Assistants? A Virtual Assistant is an independent office support who works via the Internet and cell phone for someone, say in the United States, but is based in his own home, say in the Philippines. The magic of modern media. Virtual Assistants save employers much money. Since the VAs are independent contractors, for the contracting company, there are no employee-related taxes, insurance or benefits; there are no office spaces to create, and no equipment or supplies to make available.

As a VA, you can be an Executive Assistant, Office Manager, Supervisor, Secretary, Legal Assistant, Paralegal, Legal Secretary, Real Estate Assistant, Information Technology Assistant, Online Personal Assistant, Online Sales Assistant, Virtual Webmaster Assistant, Virtual Marketing Assistant, Virtual Content Writing Assistant etc. In other words, a VA provides support to any number of clients in terms of the following services: administrative, technical and creative.

There is the International Virtual Assistants Association based in the United States that has a membership of 600 VAs in 16 countries (ivaa.org), assisting the assistants. Virtual Assistants were once referred to as Telecommuters, says Jodi Diehl, past president of IVAA. According to her:

Originally telecommuting was reserved for those who were administrative in nature. With advancements in technology, the Virtual Assistant Industry now consists of enterprising individuals, many of whom have elected to leave corporate positions in order to provide highly skilled services virtually, as entrepreneurs.

What are the advantages to companies when they hire Virtual Assistants?

In addition to eliminating the taxes, vacations, insurance and other employee-related costs, the Virtual Assistant Industry offers the corporate world access to an incredible pool of specialized talent previously unobtainable. Technology has enabled this fantastically flexible and beneficial new way to do business quickly, efficiently and economically.

And who are those who engage VAs for their services? There are real estate agents, authors, photographers, national speakers, financial advisors, coaches, corporate and industrial institutions. "VA clients are companies or individuals," says Jodi, "who understand the importance and enjoy the advantages of having experts in their team."

Being the unbeatable #1 in the field of virtual assistance, the Philippines should take advantage of its supremacy. Now then, I recommend that the Philippine government provide at least 50% of the budget it allots for OFWs for our resident Reverse OFWs, to help the poor but deserving Pinoys put up their own Internet-based home office and even pay for their VA training.

To those who have doubts, why should the whole world hire Virtual Assistants from the Philippines? Let's have it from Owen McGab Enaohwo (hireyourvirtualassistant.com):

Hiring a Virtual Assistant from the Philippines makes perfect sense since Filipinos are hard workers and have an impeccable work ethic compared to other international VAs. You can find quality but less expensive workforce from the Philippines. Aside from skills, they value competence and are well versed in both spoken and written English.

Rian Estefan says "The Philippines (is) the best place to look for a Virtual Assistant" (businessroot, wordpress.com):

Hiring a virtual assistant from the Philippines is the perfect solution to all your virtual assistant needs. Filipinos are renowned worldwide for being hard workers with the right work and personal ethics. They are also well versed in both written and oral English.

In the years to come, the Pinoy VAs will then be those who will help the Philippines make colonies of all the world using the mighty sword called American English. This tiny colony of ours will then be the colonizer of the business world, and much loved.

Filipino nationalists from the bottom to the top, wake up from your Quezonian slumber!

MANILA: How aware is the #1 University of Agriculture in the Philippines when it comes to the big issues of agriculture? I'm not aware that it's aware, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I know UP uniquely enjoys academic freedom, but this isn't academic!

On 16 February 2012, Agham Party-List Rep Angelo Palmones warned that some 43,389 coconut trees in 7 towns in Batangas had already been damaged by coconut scale insects (Jazmin S Camero, congress.gov.ph). Palmones said in his privilege speech:

Combating the raging coconut infestation needs support and immediate action. The fear of a widespread infestation, if not contained and stopped is real. Provinces in nearby Batangas Province, like Laguna and Quezon are likely to catch the infestation.

There was no immediate action. Several months later, the Inquirer reported that those insect pests had destroyed more coconut trees in Batangas (Marrah Erika Lesaba, 8 June 2012, inquirer.net). It's the same coconut scale insects, the destructive CSI; even the scientific name is revealing: Aspidiotus destructor. The insects had damaged coconuts in the cities of Tanauan and Lipa, as well as the towns of Calaca, Lemery, Santo Tomas, Malvar, Agoncillo, Talisay, Laurel and Balete. More than 138,000 trees had been attacked, denying 1,286 farmers their livelihood.

That means that in about 5 months, there was an additional 94,611 trees destroyed, an average of 18,922 trees a month.

On 14 June 2012, or only 6 days later, the PCA claimed that it had contained the infestation and that it was "not expected to reach epidemic proportions" (ANN, ucap.org.ph). Was that a promise?

On 1 February 2013, it was reported that "coconut plantations in nine towns in Batangas are still grappling with scale insect infestation but efforts have (been) to control the spread of the insects, according to the Philippine Coconut Authority" (Czeriza Valencia, philstar.com). That was a promise unfulfilled.

On an undisclosed date, the Coconut Media Service of the Philippine Coconut Authority reported the following (pca.da.gov.ph):

Agriculture Secretary Proceso J Alcala and Philippine Coconut Authority Administrator (PCA) Euclides G Forbes vowed in a public forum to wipe out once and for all the scale insect now ravaging around 179,000 coconut trees in nine municipalities of the Province of Batangas. The forum was held in Tanauan City.

Promise? I suppose that forum happened after 2012, because now the number of trees has increased by 41,000 trees, which gives us an average of about 3,000 trees destroyed every month. I'll take that data with a grain of salt.

That news item said the Board of PCA had allotted PhP 10 million for eradication of the CSI menace. Forbes said the aim was to fully eradicate the pest and fully rehabilitate the trees. "We will first prune the tree, spray it with a solution of banana oil and perfekthion, and then completely apply the fertilizer to help the tree to recover fully." Have we spent the 10 million yet?

On 31 January 2014, even the coconut trees in Mt Makiling were now infested by CSI; see image (Pia Ranada, rappler.com). Magno Mercado, a coconut farmer from Los Baños, was blaming the government, saying, "Ang ating gobyerno, eh alam na may sakit, hindi agad nila inagapan na kumuha agad ng solusyon na hindi dumami agad 'yung insectong hayop na 'yan."Our government officials already knew about the disease, yet they did not look for a quick solution to stop the multiplication of those insect brutes.

The CSI beasts have now invaded UP territory. Today, 5 March 2014, I search the UP Los Baños website (uplb.edu.ph) for "coconut disease batangas" (including the double quotes), and the response I get is "NO RESULTS FOUND" (in allcaps, like that). I search again, this time for these 3 words, coconut scale insect, no quotes, and I get the exact same answer. UP Los Baños doesn't care what's happening outside the campus? I know of course that UPLB doesn't grow coconuts, but it's still agriculture and those trees are growing within a stone's throw of the campus. That is because much of Mt Makiling is under the jurisdiction of the University of the Philippines Los Baños. So, it appears that my alma mater has done on this matter absolutely nothing.

UP Los Baños has its Center for Technology Transfer & Entrepreneurship; doesn't this University know that in the coconut we have the healthiest oil in the world, and UPLB already has the technology to exploit it? I discovered that virgin coconut oil is the best natural oil when I was diagnosed with high blood pressure last month and I began to search on how to lower blood pressure naturally (read my essays in my new blog, High Blood, Tall Tales, blogspot.com). Coconut has saturated fats that do not oxidize; corn oil and soybean oil have unsaturated fats that oxidize and yield free radicals– and by that name alone, you know they are enemies of the human body. It is the unsaturated fats that saturate arteries and clog them, causing hypertension. The CSI is not causing hypertension among UP Los Baños scientists?

In the 1920s, American agribusiness began to demonize saturated fats (such as butter, coconut and palm oils) and angelize unsaturated fats (soy, corn, canola, sunflower oils) as heart-healthy alternatives (Randy & Leslie, coconutsecret.com). (The word angelize is my invention – fah.) Unfair competition.

Doesn't UP Los Baños know that with coconut and its byproducts alone, the Philippines can be #1 in Asia in terms of entrepreneurship – and therefore, of national development? Banana and pineapple are big exports, but they're multinational; coconut can be a much bigger export, and it's all national; even the poor farmers stand to benefit from the value chain.

UP Los Baños has under its wings the National Crop Protection Center, so what has this office been doing for the coconut farmers plagued by those destructive coconut scale insects? Save those coconuts!

Last month, some 99,384 coconut trees were reported infested by CSI in the towns of Lucban, Mauban, Polillo, Sariaya, Candelaria, Tiaong, San Antonio, Dolores, and Tayabas City (Ruel M Orinday, 21 February 2014, pia.gov.ph). That gives me 278,384 coconut trees reported damaged by CSI in Luzon since 2012.

2 years after Rep Palmones' privilege speech in Congress, the PCA has not contained the CSI infestation, and UP Los Baños has done nothing about it that I know of. If the technicians cannot solve the problem and the scientists don't want to get involved, it only shows that we Filipinos are not using our coconuts.

When will we start?

MANILA: As ever, Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago is once again a revelation we can believe in. At least, I can. Ms Nonconformist, meet Mr Original Aboriginal.

Today, I want to marry Lito Yap David, the lone slingshot crusader, with Ms Miriam, the lone ranger crusader.

I go to Facebook once in a while and I have noticed quite a few times Lito Yap David earnestly campaigning for the ouster or removal from office or, at the very least replacement, of President Noynoy Aquino. And he wants it now! He says:

I wish I could put it in a way really reflective of how I feel about Noynoy Aquino. An entire generation of bright young people was lost because of martial law while in the current case I feel that 3 generations of our people (are) about to be written off, burned (out) and wasted all because we again put an uncaring Aquino to power.

He then quotes like-minded former Senator Kit Tatad as saying (10 March 2014, manilastandardtoday.com):

Our desolate national landscape is something we owe entirely and singularly to President BS Aquino III. This could explain why not a few seem to be looking forward to seeing Binay succeed him. But with or without Binay in the picture, many would like to see a change in the presidency soon. They would like to see BS III out, not in 2016 as scheduled, but today, now, this very moment – would that they could have done it yesterday!

Et tu, Kit? Senator, First things first!

First, let's debate far and wide on whether or not we could and should remove the incumbent President from office by recall. Let it be a passionate debate; let there be logical fallacies where there may be, but no name-calling please!

Second, let's agree on the approach of how to remove an incumbent President from office, and right now I can think of a handful of options.

One, we can do it with a coup. Some people who have the clout can encourage the military to take power. And Noynoy will have to cut and cut out clean. The problem with that is you are substituting political power with military power, and we now know that history has debunked Mao Tse Tung many times over: Political power does not grow out of the barrel of a gun. That belongs to romantic fiction.

Two, we can do it with People Power. That will be in a bloodless coup, not unlike People Power I in 1986 when President Ferdinand Marcos was forced to abdicate power, or People Power II in 2001 when President Joseph Estrada yielded to popular pressure. We can organize rallies after demonstrations in key cities and towns and shame Noynoy to give up the presidency on his own volition, or by social media we will force him to. Again, we will need the cooperation of the military and the rest of the executive and legislative branches of government, not to mention the judiciary, but we can do it again.

Three, we can do it with a recall vote. We can do that if we mobilize a million citizens to sign a petition on paper. It will take weeks or months, but it can be done.

I think that's too long. There must be a faster way. Now then, let's agree on the method for the madness. Enter Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago! She brandishes as a weapon her insight on social media and politics in the Philippines.

Ms Miriam says, "Social media will be game changer in 2016" (Mia Gonzalez, 10 March 2014, rappler.com). "The future of political warfare will take place online."

I believe her.

With social media, I imagine only a few will have to go out on the streets and demonstrate. Social media is more exciting, more refreshing. I love it because you can be passionate and don’t have to shout. You can out-think and out-create the opposite side any time all the time.

"Claim your (media) power!" she says. Not the multi-billion-peso campaign funds but social media will influence the outcome of the 2016 elections. "It is entirely possible that the 2016 presidential and senatorial elections will be determined by social media," Ms Miriam told students of Assumption College in Makati City on Monday, 10 March, in a gathering celebrating the school's Communication Week. Why not? All things being equal, social media is the social mind.

Social media technologies and systems are tools for communication, to lead or mislead, to inform or infirm, to explain or exclaim, to encourage or discourage, to create or recreate, to construct or destruct. Ms Miriam says some aspirants may have hired social media experts to improve their bids in the next elections, and they have the funds to do that, and more. Not to worry. To the contrary, in the World Wide Web, Ms Miriam says, "netizens have the power to negate the chances of undeserving candidates through social media." With the power of social media, denizens of the Web will be able to browbeat "the candidates with unexplained wealth and their criminal campaign contributors."The evildoers never had it so bad.

She mentions social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as venues where people can "easily and inexpensively" contact each other and share information and insights. Therefore, media and not money will now command attention and votes. The truth will out, no matter who gets hurt. If you don't want to get hurt, get out of the way of the truth!

"The power of the rich politicians becomes more porous, and the political warlords have less control," Ms Miriam says. You can run longer on much less energy than before:

Today, social media has changed the rules of the game. Anyone can participate in the extended debate to distinguish the truth from the propaganda of moneyed candidates. There will be less rallies and motorcades. Such is the power of social media. Claim it!

Now!

Oh yes, as Ms Miriam says it, "Social media has changed the rules of the game." I thank her for pointing out that awesome fact. And, I say, social media has transformed Marshall McLuhan's "The medium is the message" into this: "The mind is the message." Even to this: "The mind is the medium."

A contrarian, ANN doubts such awesome power of social media in the Philippines, making much of the World Bank 2013 data that Internet penetration in these islands is relatively low, standing at 35.2%, a far cry from Malaysia at 65.8%, Hong Kong at 72.8% and Singapore at 74.2% (author not named, 11 March 2014, ffemagazine.com). Yet ANN is careful to cite that the financial blog 24/7 Wall Street named the Philippines "the social media capital of the world" in 2011, and that "a single status message successfully led to a massive rally that called for the abolition of the pork barrel system." Even by those who count the number of Internet users and not the power of social media itself, the power of social media cannot be denied.

Personally, I should know. I have been an inveterate blogger since February 2007 (see my personal blog Frank A Hilario, blogspot.com), and I now claim to be the most creative writer in the world, with at least 1,700 essays each of at least 1,000 words on diverse topics from Asingan to Zimbabwe (see my one-stop-shop blog, The Creattitudes Encyclopedia, blogspot.com). (Excluding this sentence, this essay has 1,700 words, just coincidence.) Without advertisements for myself or any of my blogs, you can google for "Frank A. Hilario" (the period after the A. is necessary) and come up with at least 100,000 citations. Google "Jomar Hilario" who is my son and into Internet marketing, and you get only 10,000 results, 10 times fewer. Not surprising. Jomar is targeting only those who want to become Virtual Assistants; I am targeting the whole world with my creative ideas. Right now I have 17 active blogs.

Never mind the low penetration of Internet in Northern Luzon, Central Luzon, Southern Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao; in marketing, it's Metro Manila that counts, whether you're marketing products or ideas. That's what I learned 40 years ago when I was working as a copywriter for Tony Zorilla's Pacifica Publicity Bureau under Nonoy Gallardo as Creative Director. I learned that Metro Manila is the mind and market of the Philippines – if you have sold it in Manila, you have sold it in the entire archipelago. So, with social media, you just have to target those in Metro Manila and suburbs.

Knowing all that, I don't want to wait for 2016, that long. I want that presidential recall now. Let's use social media and claim power! Then it will be our social media savvy against theirs. The accused have the right to plead innocent and disprove the accusations; it will then become their social media against our social media. This will be a great spectacle, because while you can buy the traditional mass media, you can't silence social media. I remember being rejected by the major Manila papers one after the other, but when I learned to blog, I saw that blogging was the revenge of the unpublished writer. Today I see social media as the revenge of the unpublished masses.

Ms Miriam also says the Assumption students should go on to "fight back against social evils" and

Be the tide that will cleanse the Philippines of the corrupt and the useless. Weaponize social media. Fire up your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and Instagram accounts on demanding social change. You can do this by posting content that does not only inform, but also entertains and motivates.

"Learn graphic design, videography, and programming language," Ms Miriam says. "This way, you will be more equipped in creating riveting content that will arouse, organize and mobilize the masses."

Excellent advice. I say, go do it!

I'm not poor; I do not speak for myself. As the General Manager of my hometown Asingan, Pangasinan's Nagkaisa Multi-Purpose Cooperative, I speak for the millions of poor farmers who are members and non-members of coops who have yet to be emancipated from poverty. I know that Noynoy has so far neglected the poor. His Conditional Cash Transfer will never emancipate the poor from poverty. It just encourages mendicancy.

The best that Noynoy Aquino has had to offer to the poor famers and such other producers in the Philippines is what NEDA calls inclusive growth. Unfortunately, the national plan includes the active participation of traders who are allowed to siphon off from the producers all the values in the supply and marketing chains. The rich (traders) still get richer and the poor (farmers) still get poorer. With inclusive growth and Noynoy Aquino as Chair, NEDA is portraying and perpetrating the status quo – social media is for portraying and perpetrating the status good.

To emancipate them from poverty, the poor producers must be taught and supported by their cooperatives in becoming their own middlemen, as simple as that. That's why I have called for Super Coops (see my essay, "The Super Coops of 2014,"Nagkaisa, blogspot.com).

We want the next President of the Philippines to be truly pro-poor, and only social media will help us find him – or her, I don't mind, as long as we find him ASAP. If social media finds that you are not pro-poor, we want you out!

If Noynoy Aquino is innocent as charged, he has the social media to bring out his case to the World Wide Web. Fair enough?

So, someone with clout will have to start a petition for Noynoy's recall at change.org or avaaz.org. We will submit the petition to the world when we have 1 million online signatures. The count starts today.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now!

ARAMAL, SAN FABIAN: Here is Saturnino Distor, General Manager of the Aramal-Tocok Multi-Purpose Cooperative of San Fabian, Pangasinan yesterday, Saturday, 15 March 2014, speaking at the conclusion of the 11-module training program we have been conducting since August 2013 for Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Organizations (ARBOs) in La Union and Pangasinan. GM Distor is talking about our consultancy services for common service facilities (CSF) for production & processing, agri-technology and agri-extension services within the Agrarian Reform Community Connectivity and Economic Support Services (ARCCESS) Project of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR). For all that language, UMIC's part of Project ARCCESS is market-oriented, meaning the farmers must produce and process for the market and profit from all that.

Specifically, GM Distor is talking about the 3-day Workshop on Cooperative Business Planning held at the ATI Training Center in Santa Barbara on 26-28 February 2014. We of UMIC International sponsored the workshop to provide hands-on one-on-one experience on preparing an agri-business plan, no matter if you didn't call it by that name.

I have already written about the training, I being one of the UMIC consultants, a Training Specialist (see my "Agrarian coops empowered? Ilocos Farmers-Entrepreneurs Training,"(05 August 2013, Nagkaisa, blogspot.com). Yesterday was memorable as it was the last of the training sessions for the Central Pangasinan cluster of ARBOs led by Aramal-Tocok MPC.

UMIC La Union-Pangasinan Team Leader Butchoy Espino had asked GM Distor to share with the participants his experience during the 26-28 February 2014 Santa Barbara workshop, which was attended by 27 officers and members of Region 1 ARBOs under Project ARCCESS. Naturally, UMIC officials, staff and the 4 project teams were there. Also attending the workshop were provincial and municipal staff of DAR, resource persons from UP Los Baños, and representatives of the Sustainable Development Solutions (SDS), which is monitoring UMIC's implementation of its ARCCESS share of services.

In the Santa Barbara workshop, the lead ARBOs were expected to come up with 3 outputs:

(a)   Business plan for the ARBO

(b)   CSF operationalization and management plan

(c)    Farm production plan.

Could you do all that in 3 days? I didn't think so, that's why before that I did a good research on the essentials of business planning myself, all the more to help guide the workshop when and if necessary. That is how in the middle of the workshop, I felt that the workshopppers would be overwhelmed unless we scaled down the expected outputs, and that's when I had the insight that we were going to ask each lead ARBO to prepare a business plan for only 1 machinery, not the whole pool of CSF equipment that they had, that is, any one and not all of these: 4-wheel big tractors, 2-wheel small tractors, combine, thresher, hand tractor (kuliglig), and transplanter.

At the start of the workshop, Ms Maridel Dizon, President of UMIC International, challenged the farmers to be good at their business planning, considering that the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) will become fully operational next year, which means that rice and corn in the ASEAN countries will be freely traded, which further means that if Filipino farmers cannot become efficient in their farming, they will lose to the famers of, say, Thailand and Vietnam, who already are exporting rice to the world, including the Philippines.

AFTA calls for smart, not lazy agriculture. That is to say, if Filipino farmers know their agri but not their business, they stand to lose to business-minded farmers of Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, not to mention China. They must not only increase yields but must reduce costs and grab marketing opportunities. Which reminds me: The Chinese introduced rice farming in the Philippines; so why didn't Filipino farmers ever learn from the Chinese about farming as a business?

In the workshop, the 1st resource speaker, from the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), Professor Normito Zapata Jr of the College of Economics, presented the 10 important components of a coop business plan (with my annotation):

(1)         Background of the business project – Where are you coming from?

(2)         Objectives – What do you want to happen?

(3)         Overview of the industry – Where does your project belong in the scheme of things?

(4)         Profile of the cooperative – Describe your cooperative, especially its strengths.

(5)         Market – Do you know whom you're selling to?

(6)         Operation – How will you go about what you want to happen?

(7)         Organization and management – Who will compose your project team?

(8)         Finance – What about costs & returns?

(9)         Analysis of potential risks and problems – If something went wrong, what would it be?

(10)     Recommendations and future plans – What else needs to be done? What if you failed, or succeeded?

That's as practical as you can get. Your plan tells you what to produce, process and market, and why you have to do what you have to do.

The 2nd resource speaker, Professor Romulo Eusebio, of the UPLB Agricultural Machinery & Testing Center, gave pointers on the proper operation, repair and maintenance of the ARBO pool of farm machines that include all those CSF equipment listed above.

The 2 resource speakers added to what a member of Team La Union-Pangasinan, Dormie del Carmen knew about the subject of business planning. (Our UMIC team is composed of Butchoy Espino as Team Leader, Dormie del Carmen as Crop Specialist, and I as Training Specialist.)

The workshop was on the last 3 days of February. Today is 2 weeks later; about his experience, this is what Santa Barbara workshop participant Aramal-Tocok MPC GM Distor said, more or less:

Let us remember that farming is a business, so we farmers have to learn how to do business. A business plan is actually a feasibility study. Thanks to UMIC, in the Santa Barbara workshop, they invited experts who were very knowledgeable on their subject, so the resource persons and consultants taught us one-on-one how to prepare a business plan for our farming. They were good.

I was particularly worried that those 3 days were not enough for us to do the business plan for our CSF with so many machineries to include, so I'm glad to report that UMIC decided to spread the work by asking each lead ARBO to just work on one machinery or equipment. That made everything doable. We thank UMIC for all that.

The Santa Barbara workshop included participants only from lead ARBOs from Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union and Pangasinan; our team had ARBOs from La Union (Rissing MPC and San Jose MPC) and from Pangasinan (Aramal-Tocok MPC and Atlas-Mabuna MPC). GM Distor was one of the most active workshoppers and one of those who stayed late in the evenings to work on business planning. Indeed, we can look at the workshop as a feasibility study on whether farmers can do business planning, and we found that they can when they put their head and heart to it.

The DAR Project ARCCESS means business; the UMIC consultants mean business; so agrarian reform farmers must mean business – so that we can all succeed together.

MANILA: I loved his Pretenders and I must have read it when it was newly published, in 1962. Nowadays, just once in a while I do a very quick look at his Hindsight column in The Philippine Star, but today's content, "Rosales and Pangasinan: Roots – why they matter" (17 March 2014, philstar.com), is extra special to me. Because F Sionil here talks about his province, which is also my province; about his province of writing, which is also my province; about his province of languages, which is also my province; and about his province of social justice, which is not my province. "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" (Matthew 9: 13, NRSV).

F Sionil was born in Rosales; I was born in Asingan, 2 towns away. His beloved Rosales is now a booming town while my beloved Asingan is still a sleepy one, no thanks to either of us. His grandfather came from Cabugao, Ilocos Sur while my grandfather on my father side came from Rosario, La Union. He refers to his Rosales village as irenic while I refer to mine as ironic because it now has noticeably discarded the blood relationship for the economic. I am now a stranger in my own neighborhood.

I have met F Sionil Jose personally, the first when our common friend Orli Ochosa (God bless his soul) introduced me to him and later I gifted him a copy of my limited-edition Jose Rizal book indios bravos! Jose Rizal as the Messiah of the Redemption (December 2005, Lumos Publishing House, 187 pages). He preaches the nationalist Rizal and I preach the internationalist. He preaches Revolution; I preach Redemption. Revolution is for changes outside; redemption is for changes inside.

As a writer, he is trying to teach his protégés how to write and the Filipinos how to think; I am trying to teach the world how to think creatively and write accordingly. He has his newspaper column and I have the World Wide Web with 17 active blogs (try The Creattitudes Encyclopedia,Frank A Hilario, and iCRiSAT Watch, all 3 at blogspot.com). He has written many books; I have written a few. As author, the printed word is his oyster; as a blogger, the world is mine.

He has a Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature (1980); he is a National Artist for Literature (2001). My award is puny compared to his awards, but I'm equally proud of it: Outstanding Alumnus for Creative Writing (2011), University of the Philippines Los Baños. My creative writing is in science, not fiction.

When I say "languages," I mean the spoken and written and the language of change. He prefers to write in English, and so do I. Whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not, English is changing the Philippine landscape. How else can we be #1 OFWs? How else can we be #1 call center agents in the world?

He thinks local about the Nationalist Revolution and I think global about the new Philippine intellectual revolution. He is a nationalist that I don't understand.

F Sionil Jose writes about social justice, about the rich abusing the poor and the poor being helpless. I write about the same poor not being helpless but ignorant of their own power. I do not know about his poor, but I know my poor can learn to empower themselves and work within the system. I call my idea the Super Coops (for more details, see my essay, "The Super Coops of 2014," 30 October 2013, Nagkaisa, blogspot.com).

He mentions Asingan as the birthplace of President Fidel Valdez Ramos, the son of Foreign Minister Narciso Ramos who he says lectured him on the 1931 Colorum peasant revolt in the neighboring town of Tayug. What I know of my hometown Asingan is that it was the Ever Loyal City to the Spanish friars, and that's historical. Am I ashamed of it? Absolutely not! I know revolutions devour their own children; little revolutions devour their own little children.

By the way, in his Hindsight column, F Sionil Jose spells Narciso as Narcisco. That's a modern failure in using the Grammar & Spelling Checker. I forgive him. I happen to know he has a personal problem using the personal computer. When I met him in his Solidaridad office at Padre Faura, about 10 years ago, he was still working with his beloved typewriter while I was already into Microsoft Office 2003; now I'm into Office 2013. Some things never change.

He spells Ilocos as Ilokos and Ilocano as Ilokano, the way the Tagalogs do. I don't. I don't write for the Tagalogs; I write for the Filipinos.

He wants the rich Filipinos to build more factories, more research facilities, "so that our brilliant young people will stay." That's job creation, and it will never catch up with millions unemployed. He wants the banks to finance entrepreneurs, and that is a tall order. The rich will not risk that much.

He says:

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found. Perceptive scholars read the literatures of societies they are studying for this reason, and more – a people's culture is best dredged and understood from their literature.

Not anymore, not with the advent of science writing and in recent years blogging. Indeed, bloggers are more popular than writers now. If F Sionil Jose insists that writers have the monopoly of the truth even now, then I don't understand.

If he has convictions, then I don't understand when with admiration he quotes Nietzsche as saying, "Convictions are prisons." In any case, he goes "in search not so much for new experiences or knowledge but for answers to questions … asked by the ancients and us about ourselves, the unlived life, the unexamined experience, and beyond these – the nature of the cosmos, of infinity, of God." Then I understand.

F Sionil says:

Writers are also the ultimate teachers for it is only in literature that we learn ethics – not in classes in religion or theology. The literary depiction of life and its moral dilemmas compel us to use our conscience, to make those infallible distinctions between right and wrong.

F Sionil Jose is saying man the writer is the ultimate source of ethics. If the writer is Narcissus, yes; he is talking to himself, admiring himself. Ultimately, greatness is a writer's choice, whatever his ethics, such as (see image):

To think local, or to think global. To linger on the barrenness, or to ponder on the potentials of richness.

MANILA: The International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) makes much of what is called "4R Nutrient Stewardship Concept" in nutrient management (Tom Bruulsema, "Presentation on Know Your Fertilizer Rights Nutrient Stewardship Concept," 03 October 2012, ipni.net). Tom is the North America Northeast Region Director of IPNI; the presentation was made before the American Society of Agronomy on 10 June 2009 and is downloadable as a pdf. Since that time, the presentation has become the first article in a 5-part series from the IPNI titled "Know Your Fertilizer Rights" sponsored by The Fertilizer Institute and the Canadian Fertilizer Institute, "based on fertilizer best management practices structured around the '4R' nutrient stewardship concept."It's time we knew more about these Other 4 Rights of Man.

Under the Nutrient Stewardship Concept of Nutrient Management, the so-called 4 Rights are: the Right Source in the Right Form at the Right Place at the Right Time. Being a wide reader since 57 years ago in high school, a BS Agriculture graduate from the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture (UPCA), 49 years ago, and a World Wide Web reader, since 8 years ago, it's obvious to me that the 4 Rs of Nutrient Stewardshipall refer to commercial inorganic fertilizers. If nutrient management is all about managing your chemical fertilizers, then it's micromanaging in favor of synthetic fertilizers, which are derived from dwindling petroleum sources whose very manufacture is pollutive of the environment. This indeed is stewardship of the nutrients, not stewardship of the environment.

What about organic fertilizers? They are also rightful sources of essential plant nutrients and can be applied at the right form at the right place at the right time, right? And they naturally belong to the environment.

Which is where I'm coming from. I have a history, we might say, of organic agriculture, and it's almost half a century old.

In 1967, I was a new graduate of agriculture and working as Substitute Teacher (Horticulture) at the Horticulture Department of UPCA. As since high school I had always been an insatiable reader, from reading on my own at the main library of UPCA (now UP Los Baños) at the foot of Mt Makiling in College, Laguna, as a faculty member, I had the liberty and I used it to ransack literally the open shelves of that library. And with an open mind, that's how I learned about trash farming from American gentleman farmer Edward H Faulkner in his book Soil Development published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1952. I was probably reading it 15 years after it was published, but the concept was still new to me – and to most of the world, including the universe called the United States of America. (I read next Edward Faulkner's ThePlowman's Folly.) Totally convinced that trash agriculture was cash agriculture on the side of conservation, I then began writing about bad plowing and organic farming, and the Cow College PhDs laughed at me. I forgave them all long ago. (If you have 1967 or 1968 copies of the Philippines Free Press, you can find me there writing about a soil that is alive, and the foresters couldn't disagree more. There, I also published a poem about Vietnam, and it wasn't about agriculture.)

Edward Faulkner preached and practiced trash farming in his own farm. I preached the same but couldn't practice at the Manresa Farms of Xavier University College of Agriculture in Cagayan de Oro City; XUCA was where I landed when I was kicked out of UPCA in 1968 for having destroyed the sanctity of UPCA's celebration of Loyalty Day each year on the 10th of October; I had written an open letter, "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?" pointing out the absurdity of the celebration because what was expressed by all those faculty and students who volunteered to fight in Europe during World War 1 on 10 October 1914 was loyalty to the masters of democracy (Americans) and not loyalty to the University – the Philippines was not directly involved in that war. Truth hurts, and it hurt me – they kicked my butt.

Only half-discouraged, from the University of the Philippines, I brought my young wife and baby daughter, my German Lettera 32 portable typewriter and American books to Xavier University, and under CA Dean Fr William Masterson SJ, I taught horticulture on the basis of organic agriculture, making much of the ideas of Edward Faulkner and Ruth Stout, the patron saint of Gardening Without Work. I typed my own lecture and lab notes. A great many years later, my teaching was crowned, we might say, with success when Nicky Perlas, one of my A students, won the Right Livelihood Award, widely referred to in the world as the Alternative Nobel Prize. He had adopted biodynamic agriculture, even better than organic agriculture. I knew the student had eclipsed the teacher, but I was happy for him and organic agriculture. A good idea deserves another.

The 4 Rs of Nutrient Stewardship is a good idea – but not as intended by its advocates. No, I cannot reconcile inorganic farming with organic farming, but I can use the 4 Rs of the inorganic to argue against the inorganic, and I'm going to do that now.

The Right Source in the Right Form at the Right Place at the Right Time – what else is better than the organic as the right source of plant nutrients that already is in the right form and in the right place at the right time? If you practice trash farming, your organic matter is all over your field, your top soil enriched by the decomposition into humus. The humus increases the available nutrients and increases the ability of that soil to hold water in place for use by the roots of plants anytime anywhere in that field. Trash farming is the best 4 Rs of Nutrient Stewardship in action.

Water is the great supplier. No, your crop cannot absorb any nutrient from any inorganic fertilizer without water in your soil. Yes, your crop can absorb all the nutrients from any organic matter that decomposes in your soil because, literally, it holds water. That is why I argue that Water is the 5th Right of Agriculture. In fact, it is the 1st Right, because upon this Right all other Rights proceed – for fertilizers, you cannot have the Right Source, Right Form, Right Place and Right Time without the Right Water. And the Right Water is Organic.

Give me organic water all the time!

MANILA: Monday, 24 March 2014, we were blessed with the presence of Roman Catholic "healing priest" Fr Fernando Suarez late afternoon to evening at the covered court in Batong Malake, a village in Los Baños, Laguna. While we waited at the wings, a friend and I talked about the Mary Mother of the Poor (MMP) Foundation of Fr Suarez and the donation of 33 hectares in Cavite that now San Miguel wanted to get back, claiming that certain conditions had not been met by the MMP as agreed. In that case, my friend and I both agreed that, after all is said and done, it turns out that what San Miguel did was donate from the pocket, not from the heart. If so, we would not be surprised if what goes out of San Miguel's left pocket goes into his right pocket!

It certainly is biblical that you shouldn't let your left hand know what your right hand does. So, we were praying that millions of Roman Catholics in the Philippines will be praying that San Miguel changes his mind about un-donating those 33 hectares from MMP in the village of Amuyong in the town of Alfonso in the province of Cavite. After all, it could be San Miguel's legacy to generations to come; the board members of San Miguel will be remembered long after they're gone, for their magnificent charity. They will not be doing it for Fr Suarez or MonteMaria; they will be doing it for millions of Filipinos who are Catholics – and who happen to be consumers of San Miguel products. If business doesn't get in the way of religion, both will prosper. (By the way, I’m blogging this via the WiFi of the Calasiao Hotel, which is right across the Coca Cola plant in Calasiao, Pangasinan, and where we are staying for a farmer training consultancy in Malasiqui and San Fabian, also in Pangasinan. We are staying in the coop’s condotel, a bread & breakfast place, which is fantastic!)

When we give to others, whatever that is, great or small, it should always be for the love of God, not mammon. Out of the love for others, not ourselves. Neither expecting nor demanding something in return. If the mighty miracle of San Miguel's donation from the heart will happen, as we earnestly pray, it will be worth at least PhP 1 billion, or US$ 22,727,272 (at $ 1/PhP 44). It will not be to bless only San Miguel but to bless all Catholics not only in the Philippines but in the whole world. Charity in the millions is not to enrich a few of us but to enrich the millions.

Miracles do happen. And, not having to move again, Fr Suarez can continue smoothly in sharing his gift of healing in a mighty way. "This gift is not for me," he says. "I'm only an instrument of His power. It is for the people, for you."

Fr Suarez's gift is from the Holy Spirit, not simply from a holy heart.

At the village of Amuyong, the MMP have been laying the groundwork for building a complete Marian worship site called MonteMaria (Mary's Mountain). Ms Deedee Siytangco, a member of the MMP Board and speaking for Fr Suarez, said they had already spent some PhP 100 million to develop the roofed chapel, multipurpose area for the devotees, the Station of the Cross, parking space, and the rest of the facilities at MonteMaria. It is up to San Miguel now to develop his own charity.

In his homily during the healing mass at Batong Malake that I attended, Fr Suarez castigated, among others, those who were selfish. Madamot. He said:

Ang damot ay galing sa takot. Ang utos ng Diyos, nakapagpapalakas, nakapagpapalaya. (Selfishness comes from fear. The commandment of God strengthens, sets free.)

I'm praying that San Miguel learns to be unselfish, learns to be not afraid, and not only in taking business risks. Faith is a risk that you have to take; it is not given to you. San Miguel, if you have fears, prepare to shed them now!

Fr Suarez conducts healing missions only if and when invited. They will not be where they are not called. "We will not stay where we are not welcome," he says.

From what I have read in all those webpages, there is the insinuation that Fr Suarez has been mishandling the finances of MMP or his own foundation. "He is above all these," Deedee Siytangco says, speaking for Fr Suarez (9 March 2014, Tina G Santos, inquirer.net):

Father Suarez feels he doesn’t need to explain anything. He said he had forgiven all of his detractors and he would pray for them. For all these trials, he said he was privileged to have suffered with Jesus at this time when we are commemorating Lent.

Specifically about the funds of the MMP foundation, Deedee says:

Fr Suarez is above all these. He's not the foundation. We have a treasurer; we have audited statements. Funds are spent well. It’s just so sad that some people are trying to put down a priest who only wants to heal. There seems to be a concerted effort to have him defrocked, his ministry stopped.

We stand by him, the foundation stands behind him. We will continue his ministry, healing, livelihood, all the things that he does.

Deedee Siytangco says Fr Suarez stays for hours during healing sessions because he wants to touch everybody. I am listening to Boy Abunda interviewing Fr Suarez in "Private Conversations" and one of the questions he asks is that some people claim they have been healed even with only a wave from the healing priest. Fr Suarez says:

Sabi nila, "Father, kinawayan mo lang ako, na-heal na ako. Nginitian mo lang ako, na-heal na ako."(Father, you just waved at me, and I was healed. You just smiled at me, and I was healed.)

In that case, Abunda asks, "Are you pleased?" Fr Suarez says, "'Pleased' is not the word. Masaya ako." (I'm happy.) He is happy for them. Pleased would mean Fr Suarez considered the miracles the works of his own hands, not acknowledging that he is just the medium for the power to flow. In my very first sentence above, I wrote "healing priest" (note the quotes) because I wanted to create a doubt in your mind, to drive home a point, which I shall do now: Healing priest is misleading because it is not the priest who heals but God. Where are you, o men of little faith!

I estimated about 2,000 warm bodies in that healing mass that I attended. I don't know if they were all Catholics, but it doesn't matter. Catholic means universal– we Catholics welcome you, whoever you are.

In that healing session, after the mass, from my high seat – remember, where we were was an auditorium cum basketball court with its high-tiered concrete seats – I went down the steps and left the place after taking some photographs as Fr Suarez began to touch all those in the throng whom he had not touched (my image shows him helping a man get up from his wheelchair).

Why didn't I wait for Fr Suarez to touch me? Simple. I had already been touched.

Farmers or ARBs, following the DAR's initiative, we should want all farmers to be market-oriented. Unless you want them to be poor forever.

Farmers market-oriented? Look, so far in our 6 months of teaching (and learning) from the ARBs in several towns of La Union and Pangasinan, we have been (not) shocked to learn that farmers don't know how to compute for the unit cost of their farm produce, whether rice or corn – in that case, they don't know whether they are earning or losing money. No wonder they're always losing!

And I don't mean just losing a tooth. In the village of Aramal in San Fabian, Pangasinan, where the operator was running the harvester, I picked up a pointed piece of metal near the bund, showed him and asked what it was. It turned out to be a tooth that had broken off while the harvester was cutting the short, standing stalks (in the image, the missing tooth should be right where the 3rd tine crosses the line of teeth). I checked and noted that the tooth was made of cast iron. Did it strike a stone sticking out of the soil? No matter. As in real life, a missing tooth is just an inconvenience, not a cause to stop applying the remaining teeth on the remaining food. The harvesting went on after a fertile pause.

But what do I mean when I say the farmers are always losing?

Like, they borrow from the 5/6 people, loaning say PhP 5,000 and paying it back PhP 6,000 within 1 week or as long as agreed upon. If you think that's usury, wait till you hear the next one.

We have demonized the 20 percenters, Bombays and Filipinos alike. It's bad enough, but in fact, a 20% interest on loan is nothing compared to that charged by some people who supply farm inputs such as fertilizers and chemicals. For those, the interest that farmers have to pay upon harvest, or some 4 months later, oftentimes reaches 40%. That is not usury – that is gross injustice.

How do you feel losing 40% of your produce in a holdup? Instead of only 4%, you pay 40% on your production loan. Really, life is not fair, but this is premeditated, if very slow, murder!

In such an agrarian scenario, if you're a Christian, neither a borrower nor a lender be. Currently, that 40% is what the poor farmers have to go through because they do not realize what they're going through. They just savor the fact that they can get a quick loan when they need one, and you can credit that to opportunity cost. Not only farmers but also the small market vendors fall prey to the lures of the fast loan and the apparent kindness of the loan giver. To many of them, it's a choice between need and none. The choice of losers.

A missing tooth is not the same as a missing business plan. With a missing tooth, the eating continues; with a missing plan, the losing continues.

What we have been teaching the agrarian farmers in our consultancy is how to prepare a business plan. (Later, you might want to read my earlier essay, "Can farmers learn business planning? A feasibility study," 16 March 2014, Frank A Hilario, blogspot.com.) We noted that one of the officers himself of a cooperative did not grasp the need for a what-if scenario – like, what if I rented the hand tractor myself and did not own one? Which calls for costing the service instead of in effect listing as free, because you don't consider the use of your equipment cost. In other words, farmers don't pay themselves working for themselves, and so they don't know the true cost of production and, therefore, their true income.

Team Leader Butchoy Espino is handling the Farm Production Plan and Crop Specialist Dormie del Carmen the CSF Business Plan. I'm documenting all this as Training Specialist, but as I have found out, I am in this as a learner too, especially that I am the General Manager of my own hometown's Nagkaisa MPC in Asingan, Pangasinan, not far from here.

For the Farm Production Plan, Butchoy is asking for data such as on land preparation: what implement a farmer uses to plow, how many passes, how long it takes to plow 1 ha, and what are the expenses, including the fuel and the food. How about the fertilizers and the pesticides? And so on and so forth. Those will all go into the computation of the unit cost of a kilo of palay. Once you know your unit cost, you will know if you're making money or not.

A loan should be part of a business plan. How about the high cost of borrowing 5/6 money and the higher cost of borrowing inputs? They don't include those. So, farmers think they are not losing on their farming – and then they go ahead and wonder why they never become rich despite the fact that they are industrious and, as much as their funds allow, they follow the prescribed agricultural practices such as applying basal fertilizer when planting and spraying as instructed. I wonder if the government technicians ever wonder why most of the farmers don't ever get rich?

It strikes me today that we have come to the stage in our ARCCESS consultancy where farmers will smartly if slowly realize that the way we taught them all those technology options has been designed to lead to this:

Preparing a proper business plan.

Our farmers will now realize that all the technologies in the world of agriculture will not save them – they have to have good business sense if they want to rise from poverty. They need a business plan, whether it's 2 or 20 pages.

Now then, to simplify, I'll translate the business plan into just 2 words:

What if?

Now, let's just talk about the simple rule of cutting your costs where you can.

From what I heard, the highest single cost of rice farming is fertilizing, where a farmer regularly buys 12 bags of fertilizer to apply to 1 ha of riceland; at PhP 1,000/bag minimum, that's PhP 12,000! A lot of money to a poor farmer, or even to his landlord.

Morning today, Saturday, 29 March, 2014, we are again with leaders of the Aramal-Tocok cooperative in Aramal. While we are helping them on their business plans, suddenly one of the farmer leaders says, "If you prepare a business plan, you'll see you'll lose." We all laugh. We know what he means, that you will find out what you have failed to consider when you thought you were winning. So? You prepare another plan. Again, think what if.

Like: What if you the farmer cut costs here and there, including credit? What if you use other methods of farming that minimize your use of fertilizers, whether inorganic or organic, or where you don't need to apply any kind? Market-oriented: What if your coop buys the harvest from you and sell it directly to consumers? If you are market-oriented, you'll find that a what-if plan is always an amazing plan.

What if we don't teach the farmers to ask "What if?" The student does not learn if the teacher does not know how to teach.

EVEN THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE is now advocating organic fertilizers. As direct proof, at noon today, 30 April 2014, in Asingan, Pangasinan, I witnessed 29 farmers in Barangay Dupac graduate from a "Farmer Field School on Sustainable Agriculture with (Emphasis) on PalayCheck." The graduation ceremony even had a theme: "Learning, checking and sharing for the best farming practice."

If you ask me, what is more important to learn there is not PalayCheck but Sustainable Agriculture, because you can be perfect in checking out important technological landmarks (ü), and yet fail if you cannot sustain your family from your farming.

So, what is the best farming practice? If I have to choose one, it's organic farming. Necessary in sustainable agriculture are organic fertilizers, which are inexpensive and effective, not inorganic fertilizers, which are many times more expensive and less effective. The organic fertilizer that I'm interested in right now is called worm manure, worm cast, vermicast, or vermicompost– they all refer to the same thing, all coming from earthworms.

In the photo, Maricris is touching what I call The Good Earth, the brownish pile produced by African night crawlers (an imported earthworm species) in the farm managed by Nestor in Asingan; Maricris is one of his assistants. Vermicast is brownish because it is rich in plant nutrients. It could be the best fertilizer for your rice, corn, tobacco, peanut, sweet sorghum, pigeon pea, or vegetable farm anywhere you are in the Philippines.

And you know what? What we know about vermiculture is what we learned from a fellow Filipino (& Ilocano) by the name of Rafael Guerrero. Yes, a Filipino scientist has been teaching Asians, including the Chinese, about vermiculture since 1981, or for the last 33 years now.

The vermicast, which is the manure from the vermin (from the Latin word for worm), is truly The Good Earth, as it gives the following 13 benefits:

(1)     It increases yields.

(2)     It's an odorless fertilizer.

(3)     It's rich in plant nutrients.

(4)     It corrects the pH of your soil.

(5)     It promotes early germination of seeds.

(6)     It helps transform your garbage into wealth.

(7)     It increases the plant's resistance to disease.

(8)     It's not washed out with irrigation water or rain.

(9)     It retains enough soil moisture even in a drought.

(10)It increases the water-holding capacity of the soil.

(11)It's safe – no chemicals, no steroids, no antibiotics.

(12)It improves soil structure, porosity, aeration, and drainage.

(13)It's 4 times cheaper than inorganic fertilizer, with more nutrients per bag.

If you're worried about your nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, know that the vermicast contains 5-11 times more NPK than normal soil (Steve, 04 January 2011, ncwormfarm.com).

When German scientist Otto Graff introduced Rafael Guerrero to the African night crawler, Eudrilus eugeniae, he experimented with this species and found it to be the best for the purpose. That's why we prefer the ANC earthworm for vermiculture today.

It's actually the bacteria and fungi and other small organisms that break down dead matter first. "Earthworms perform the final task of humification – the conversion of decomposed organic matter to stable humus colloids – and mix the humus with material from the lower soil horizons" (McGill U, eap.mcgill.ca). Translation: The earthworm ingests the humus and out comes the worm manure.

If you need cheap vermicast in bulk, if you farm in Central Luzon and whatever your crop is, you may want to order from Nestor Salvador. I visited his vermiculture setup last week, I was impressed with what he has learned and what he can now produce:

(a)     You don't need to build a rain shelter for the earthworms; all you need is a layer of leaves to protect the worms and the whole setup from heavy rains.

(b)      Nestor can produce 200 bags of vermicast in 60 days, ready to apply. If you need more, you can ask for more. You can of course make your own vermicompost and grow your own earthworms. To answer your questions or for more details, contact Nestor through Ms Maricris Espiritu, 0918-237-6744. I know they know.

Somebody else, also from Asingan, told me you can feed the worms to ducks and they will give you surprisingly many more eggs. What are worms made of? Protein, essential amino acids, fats, vitamins, and minerals good for livestock and fish also (cropsreview.com). Another kind of The Good Earth. – By Frank A Hilario, 30 April 2014

MANILA: After its yearbook disaster, Barry Goldwater High School as Top 28 in Arizona is dead. Can BGHS rise again, like the Phoenix?

"Most Memorible Experience" is horrible. Wrong spellings, capitalization errors, misplaced text, wrong page references, missing pictures, even wrong volume number and year on the spine – that describes the 2013-2014 yearbook of the Barry Goldwater High School; it's a "book of blunders," says Kristen Keogh (16 May 2013, myfoxphoenix.com). This one is a "book of wonders" because it's unbelievable. The BGHS campus is found in Phoenix, Arizona. The BGHS has had award-winning yearbooks in the past; will this Phoenix rise again from its ashes?

BGHS student Ashtyn Dial said, "There's a lot of mistakes in it." Each student paid $70 for a copy of this yearbook of errors. Senior student Teresa Martinez said, "There (are) a whole (bunch) of typos and I (have) a friend who (has) her name seven times in the yearbook and every single time it (is) misspelled." And "Principal" is misspelled as "Principle."

The CEO of Grads Photography, which printed the book, apologized in a public statement, saying, "We are truly sorry for the cover that has the wrong year, the school and our company both failed to catch that error. The student that was affected by writing on her image is also an extremely regrettable situation." BGHS has issued stickers to cover up the misprints, but they couldn't cover up the anger and frustration of many parents and students.

If you have a ghost / But you don't want to play host / You can't sleep at all / So, who do you call? (Ghostbusters!)

Can you bust the ghost hiding there? It should read, "So, whom do you call?"

The Deer Valley Unified School District that has jurisdiction over BGHS apologized for the School in a statement (Mike Watkiss, 16 May 2014, azfamily.com):

We would like to sincerely apologize for the issues concerning the yearbook this year. We recognize that you purchased a yearbook and your purchase is a valuable investment in the continuation of the yearbook program. The yearbook staff spent countless hours putting the yearbook together and we humbly ask for your forgiveness and understanding and not direct blame and criticism toward the school. While we try to make every effort to ensure perfection, unfortunately, some mistakes were made. For that, we are truly sorry. Thank you for your time and understanding with this situation, please continue to support the yearbook and it's (sic) dedicated staff.

"That's not acceptable," parent Norma Quinn said. "We want a true product. Not a haphazard product." No Ma'am, it's not acceptable – what the District has given is a poor excuse for an excuse!

Did the yearbook staff really spend countless hours putting the yearbook together? Of course they did! But they did not spend countless hours poring over the pages looking for errors and correcting them. This teacher cannot forgive them. "We humbly ask (that you do) not direct blame and criticism toward the School"– that's like saying "Do not blame the studio for its photography!"

As a certified high school teacher in 1965, and as a professional writer, editor and publisher from 1975 until now, having myself desktop-published about 40 issues of technical journals and 14 books of my own (10 published), I know without asking any question that in high school (or college), there is no one to blame but both the Editor and the Adviser for command responsibility; the Editor specifically for failing to check on content and construction, which became the ghosts, and the Adviser specifically for failing to be the Ghostbuster.

What about Grads Photography, the printer? In these days of desktop publishing and camera-ready pages, the printer has nothing to do with substance and style – you can blame the photographer for a bad picture, but not for a bad face.

I wouldn't be surprised if the young high school yearbook staff simply allowed a layout artist to do all the work and, having done that, allow him to submit to the printer the finished product. Guilty as hell.

As far as yearbooks are concerned, the adults are equally guilty. In my own country and at my own university last year, in Laguna at the campus of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, Golden Jubilarians in charge of the yearbook – I will not crucify them by naming them or crucify myself by specifying their gender – failed to watch over the shoulders of the layout artist or the sample prints of our Yearbook 2013 and so failed to notice the big mistakes, which I pointed out in my email dated 13 October 13, as follows:

"COLLEGE OF VETERINARY MEDECINE" (this was on page 45, top of the page)
"DISTINGUISED" (this mistake was repeated on pages 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 45, 47)

Those were printed in really big fonts! They also printed stickers to cover up the mistakes. I saw those unforgivable errors only after the yearbook came out in print, because they didn't show me their work-in-progress.

I also said in my email, "I think it is time to EXTINGUISH mediocrity in the yearbook by engaging the DISTINGUISHED!"

That was a double entendre, as I had been eased out, not ever so gently by email, as the volunteer editor cum desktop publisher of that yearbook.

Now then, being for the last 36 years editor of published books, journals, newsletters and (almost a) yearbook, and specifically being for the last 26 years an editor using software (Microsoft) for writing, editing and publishing, my collected experience tells me this:

 If you want perfection, you have to work for it.

If you want to be a perfect Christian, you have to sacrifice blood, sweat and tears. Excellence is in the details, and everything is detail.If you want to be a perfect Editor, you have to sacrifice time, talent and treasure over every single word and punctuation, every single image and text – and you have to do it over and over and over again. Exactly like love. You hate to do it over and over again? Practice on love.

"I thought it was a little bit irresponsible that they didn't at least proofread everything to make sure that it was right," student Teresa Martinez said. Teresa, in fact, you have to proofread again and again and again until your eyes hurt. In publishing, this Editor will tell you that every pain is a gain again and again.

Typos like memorible for memorable and principle for principal tell me those high school yearbook staff don't use enough their grammar & spelling checker in their software – it happens to the best! In times like this, the best is not good enough. If you aren't perfect, you have no business in any publication.

That is because the sad & bad reality is that:

You cannot exorcise The Ghosts of Errors Past.

So, here's a modern lesson for high school, college and alumni publications in your United States and in my Philippines, which takes after American English:

The layout artist cannot sleep on the job; the editor cannot let errors slip by; and the adviser cannot suffer fools gladly!

MANILA: I've just finished reading the latest (certainly not the last) email from just turned 90 years old (April Fool's Day) outstanding Manila surgeon Antonio Oposa Sr and, after reading this long one, consisting of back-and-forth emails, I emailed him back (in red font):

So, you turn out to be better than I read in your book, than I came to know you.

He just wrote back, "THANK YOU FRANK!"

And that has inspired to write this new one.

THE DR ANTONIO OPOSA I KNOW

He has been a great surgeon, of this I have no doubt, working on soft and hard and warm bodies; but he has not been a great operator in working with software and hardware with or without warm bodies, of this I have no doubt too – he couldn't have formatted "THANK YOU FRANK!" in caps & lower case like "Thank you, Frank!" with the font in bigger size, or in red, like you can do in Gmail, which he uses, and often.

It doesn't matter really. He is 90 and I am 74, going on 75, and I suppose the difference of 16 years has proven to be in favor of doing things the old way, not high tech. And no, those delicate surgeon's fingers haven't learned the home keys, so he types essentially in what I call the Biblical Method: Seek and ye shall find. Well, as a fine surgeon, sure as hell he knows where to find what he's looking for.

He has 1 iPad, or is it 3? He has 1 laptop, or is it 4? He loves modern gadgets, but that love has not been reciprocated by those gadgets. In any case, he is not operating in a vacuum – he can always summon someone to teach him to get out of trouble, technical trouble.

Like his friend Tony Meer (God bless his soul!) he has had many girl friends, and I'll just leave it at that. If you read his autobiography, Give Me The Flowers ... Now! (2005), for which from him you can ask for a copy, you may be able to tell by reading between the lines. Let me just say this: I know that girls always fall in love, and that boys always fall for girls they like.

I'm not going to repeat what I wrote in a series about him and which appeared in my blog; I'm just giving you the links so you can read those, as you wish; I wrote them as one but uploaded them separately into 4 parts in the same day, Monday, 25 April 2011:

A Surgeon's Life Cut Open (0): Antonio C Oposa Sr (The Creattitudes Encyclopedia, blogspot.com)
A Surgeon's Life Cut Open (1): Most interesting, Dr Oposa (The Creattitudes Encyclopedia, blogspot.com)
A Surgeon's Life Cut Open (2): Most intriguing, Dr Oposa (The Creattitudes Encyclopedia, blogspot.com)
A Surgeon's Life Cut Open (3): Most passionate, Dr Oposa (The Creattitudes Encyclopedia, blogspot.com)

I just downloaded those 4 essays and they count up to 19,800+ words, or an average of 4,950 words each essay. I usually write 1,000+ essays, but this life is extraordinary that I had to give it extraordinary space to tell the story in parts. I believe it is my best gift to him, not that I have given him any other one!

THE DR ANTONIO OPOSA I DON'T KNOW

The email he just sent me started when he sent an email response to him by another surgeon, Dr Eusebio C Kho, which was in reply to the email of Dr Din Mabanta. This Dr Mabanta had written for permission to name a health service initiative at Bantayan Island in Cebu, what Dr Kho refers to as the "Dr Antonio C. Oposa Center for Health and Happiness"– although you don't usually dedicate a monument or edifice to someone who is still alive. This is highly unusual, and that is because Dr Oposa is a highly unusual son of a guts– he has the slang meanings of that word, and these are courage, fortitude, nerve, audacity. Guts was what made him a great surgeon, and a great person. No, I didn't say perfect.

Dr Kho wrote Dr Mabanta:

What you intend to do – name your health service initiative after a great medical statesman, an excellent surgeon and a great Filipino patriot – floods us, his admirers, with great ecstasy and joy!

Dr Kho wrote that the Oposa Center will make it possible for the financially challenged people of Cebu and the rest of the Visayas to avail themselves of "affordable, good, basic medical care." He said that the concept of the center as a cooperative is "very excellent"– and I say Amen! to that. As the General Manager myself of the Nagkaisa Multi-Purpose Cooperative in my hometown of Asingan, Pangasinan, I know a cooperative will benefit the members, because the coop will make high-quality products (like medicines) and services (like medical checkups) available at low costs.

Dr Kho also said in his email (his in italics, my comments in regular text):

I am sure you know of Dr Oposa's legendary climb to the top of Philippine Surgery. A 1951 graduate of the UP College of Medicine at the top rung of his class, he became a surgical resident at the PGH. He happened to visit a sick relative in San Francisco, at (the UC San Francisco) Medical Center. He met the surgeons there who were impressed with his intellectual persona, his medical knowledge and his desire to be a surgeon.

Dr Oposa is just like me, I think: When he opens his mouth, you will either like him, or you won't. There are no 2 ways about it. When he comes on, it can be hard on some people. But if you're good, you know better.

They offered him residency and he accepted. While serving in that capacity, his record was brilliant, both didactically and practically -- his operative skills were extraordinary!

Having read his book again and again (a couple of years ago, I had actually finished coming up with an updated edition), I knew that. Indeed, he keeps offering to operate on my H and H, all expenses paid, but I have always declined, because considering his great skill and my great age (74 going on 75) as well as my great horror at surgery of any kind, I'm afraid afterwards people would say, "The operation was successful; unfortunately, sepsis set in and ..." I couldn't have finished that sentence, could I?

At the conclusion of his residency, after being Chief Resident in General, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery, he was offered the position of Attending Surgeon at the legendary University of California San Francisco Medical Center (UCSF Med Center). His love of native land and the Filipino people made him turn down that offer; he wanted to return to his beloved country and serve his people. He has the distinction of being the only Filipino to have completed residency in surgery at the UCSF!  

The return of the native was what convinced me that Dr Oposa was indeed an unusually great person. Given such a similar chance, bigger or smaller, most successful Filipinos abroad would elect to stay abroad, especially in the US of A. He was my (medical) hero! He reminded me of Jose Rizal, another hero I had always admired.

When he started servicing the people in Manila as a "compleat" surgeon in the three surgical subspecialties, he met resistance. He was even refused admitting privileges at the PGH – there was envy and fear that he was going to steal the patients of the other surgeons.

When you're good, you can't help but be good – and can't help other people from being envious and wary of you.

I hear that he was a great lecturer; he could hold the attention of the class because of his charisma and good knowledge of the subject matter. In the OR, he was a great operator – his technique and gentle handling of tissues – plus his physiologic approach to surgical problems harked back to Dr. William Halsted, The Father of American Surgery.

Oh, he is a great speaker all right. He can hold the attention of any group with his charm and confidence and knowledge of the subject matter – and other pieces of information that add to the substance of his presentation. Masterful and playful, he can and will recite a proper poem, or even sing "Sing A Song Of Sixpence" that tells of blackbirds bad:

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie!

Did you know that these verses are also added to the 4 original? A blackbird had pecked off the maid's nose, so:

They sent for the king's doctor
Who sewed it on again;
He sewed it on so neatly,
The seam was never seen!

Great surgery. I continue quoting Dr Kho:

His extracurricular activities on behalf of the country in medical fields are well known. He was President of the Philippine Medical Association at an early professional age, butting heads with established GP's who had the upper hand; but he won! He was President of the Philippine Surgical Society. He also was a member of the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of its Board of Governors for several terms. Even now, in retirement, his surgical opinions are sought after by younger surgeons. He continues to see surgical patients and to donate to many good charities.

Dr Kho (Eusebio C Kho) is an MD, FACS, of UP Med Class '60. Diplomat for Life, American Board of Surgery. President, UPMASA 2007-2009. Colonel, US Army (Retired). He lives in Scottsburg, Indiana.

What prompted Dr Kho to write about Dr Oposa was the following email by Dr Mabanta to Dr Oposa that he sent to Dr Kho:

My name is Din Mabanta. I manage Health Innovation Multipurpose Cooperative in Cebu. It is the first cooperative in Cebu that is engaged in healthcare services. We hope to provide quality basic health services to the marginalized. I would often describe it as: “Private hospital service at health center price”. Yes, it can be done. We will soon bring this model to Bantayan Island with a partnership with your son, Atty A Oposa.

Encouraged myself, I think we will emulate in my hometown such coop-based health services especially for the disadvantaged.

It is such a privilege to meet you virtually. I have heard so much about you from Atty Oposa who speaks so often and so fondly about you. I remember the first time I met him, which was probably about 2 years ago. He spoke to me of a health center that he would put up for you in Bantayan. He beamed with such joy as he described you to me. He wanted to dedicate the health center to you who has inspired, moved, and touched so much lives medically and non-medically.

We went on with our busy lives until, recently, things have started to come into place. We both believe that the time is now. The Center for Health and Happiness (CHH) will soon rise in Bantayan Island. Atty Oposa has been more than supportive in this endeavor. It is amazing that all he asks is for CHH to be dedicated to you. He loves you dearly.

I remember Dr Antonio Codilla Oposa Sr was ROTC Corps Commander in Pre-Med. So I'll try another type of ending to my essay, and this time it's a hand salute.

Excluding this line, the total number of words in this essay is 1924, the year Dr Oposa was born.

That language is now vanished, gone, kaput, finished, the end. Now, if you equate language with Tagalog, because that was the native tongue of Jose Rizal, as he was from the town of Calamba in Southern Luzon, if you are right, the boy Rizal was lamenting that Tagalog was dead.

Of course not! Here he was writing in Tagalog. Read the poem again and you will see that the explanation is that when he writes sariling wika he really means freedom, or independence. Actually, he planted the word "freedom" early in the poem. Pepe was a naughty, brilliant boy poet. Note the language: "dinatnan ng sigwa" ("by waves overthrown") – these words refer to the overthrow of Philippine sovereignty by the Spanish conquerors, our loss of freedom. They did not overthrow Tagalog – in fact, the Spaniards wanted the Tagalogs to keep their tongue tied; they didn't want us Filipinos to learn their language and therefore their culture.

Read the poem again. Jose Rizal was not a nationalist; he was an internationalist.

(4)     THE JOSE RIZAL YOU DON'T KNOW: THE PROPAGANDIST

If you insist that Jose Rizal was for Tagalog as the national language, why did he not write in Tagalog his revolutionary works Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo?

More: Why did he study German and correspond fully with Ferdinand Blumentritt? Did you know that Rizal's BFF was FB, who was a Roman Catholic through and through? I'm a Roman Catholic and I believe I know why. The Catholics will give you admiration for your talents and forgive you your sins! Didn't Christ say? "Love your enemies!"

And more: Why did he write in Spanish in La Solidaridad, the newspaper of the Propagandists? Why did those Propagandists write in Spanish? Are you telling me they did not love their country, and that they were ashamed of it? (At first they were, as Rizal wrote in one of his letters, but they overcame their inferiority complex when they saw the American Indian braves, proud of who they were even if they were being exhibited as uncivilized. Los Indios Bravos!)

Jose Rizal was writing to his target audience, which is always correct. With the Noli and Fili, he was writing to the Spanish of noble heritage or character, including the insulars and peninsulars.

And no, he was not for Andres Bonifacio's Revolution – he was for Jose Rizal's Redemption of the Filipino Race. Here is the 9th stanza of his valedictory poem "Adios, Beloved Country" (my translation):

Pray for all of those who perish without gladness,
For all those who suffer torments without equal;
For our hapless mothers who wail in bitterness,
For orphans and widows, for captives in distress,
And pray for you to see your redemption final.

(5)     THE JOSE RIZAL I KNOW: THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

He was Tagalog but he aimed his Spanish to the propagandists, to the reformers in Spain and in the Philippines. Tagalog to the women of Malolos. German to his friend. The communication lesson I have relearned reading and thinking about Jose Rizal is that I have to talk to my readers in their language, or in the language they should use for their best interests. And so, relearning the use of language from Jose Rizal, even as I am an Ilocano and adept at Tagalog, I write in English for 4 reasons:

English is the language of science. There is no science in in my Ilocano or your Tagalog; you can go on and concoct equivalent terms and call it Filipino, but why spend billions for growing a language that is local? The English language already is global – it's also free!

English is a beautiful language. If you want to compare Tagalog with English, place an original English translation of the Noli (like that by Maria Soledad Lacson-Locsin, which I say is the best English version) side by side with a Tagalog version (like that of Virgilio Almario, which Ambeth Ocampo says is "the best contemporary Filipino translation,"inquirer.net) – if you are a Filipino, you will be disappointed at what you will find out. Impressive, even haunting, but daunting, deep Tagalog translations, they don't catch the nuance and the humor (satire) of the author, which are crucial in understanding the whole book.

English is the language of the world. I want to know what the world knows, and I want the world to know what we know in the Philippines, and what we are fighting for and why, and how.

English is our competitive advantage. We are very good at it, the Ilocanos, Tagalogs, Cebuanos, Ilonggos, Pangasinenses, Igorots whoever in the Philippines and anywhere in the world, so I'm calling on the nationalists, including those in my alma mater UP:

Stand UP for the Filipino! Open your arms, eyes, minds – and pockets. To English.
Why be blind and deny the Filipinos the best tool they can use to compete? With English.
Why not encourage the Filipinos to show the world their best? In English!

MANILA: Rice is a grain not linked to the brain, but it should be, and I'm going to prove it now. The College of Agriculture of UP Los Baños didn't teach me that, but professors can always learn from their students. I shot the original of this photograph in Bangar, La Union 09 August 2013, but rice is a continuing story that needs to be on the head, so there!

On the 10th of May 2014, The Economist came out with 2 articles: "The new green revolution: A bigger rice bowl" and "How better rice could save lives: A second green revolution"– I'm always interested in grain revolutions, but this one I didn't know. What I didn't know didn't help me until someone emailed me the pdfs. Thank you, kind Sir!

There are 2 main assertions in the stories by ANS[1] of The Economist, and these are: (1) More funds for rice research will cost less per head and will return more for the money. Come on, people: Invest. (2) The world needs to breed faster better rice varieties to counter the twin effects of climate change, droughts and floods. Come on, people: Invest some more.

Those assertive calls for more investment are for more technologies on rice. Just in time. I'm immersed right now in the technologies of rice production. I have an ongoing engagement as one of the consultants recruited by UMIC International for the Agrarian Reform Community Connectivity and Economic Support Services, or ARCCESS Project of the Department of Agrarian Reform in the provinces of Pangasinan and La Union. Under ARCCESS, our TOR is titled "Market-Oriented Agri-Technology and Agri-Extension Services," so after I studied for my BS Agriculture major in Ag Education in the classroom, to learn to teach the technology of inorganic agriculture at the College of Agriculture of the University of the Philippines in the 1960s, some 40 years later I'm out there in the field teaching inorganic agriculture, but this time compared with the organic. Times change, if slowly.

Now, community connectivity and economic support, let's see about that.

But first, let us examine the New Green Revolution The Economist speaks of. To quote ANS:

The second revolution will be different. Farmers will not adopt a single miracle variety. Instead, researchers will tailor seeds for particular environments (dry, flooded, salty and so on). And they are also trying to boost the nutritional quality of rice, not just the number of calories. As a result, the second revolution will be felt most profoundly in the poorest areas and among the poorest farmers.

The new precision agriculture, I may say. It calls for computations to justify the call for more funds for technology research in rice:

The amounts needed are small. By one calculation, $3 billion of rice research spread over the next 25 years would pull 150 million people out of extreme poverty. That is $20 a person, a bargain compared with any other anti-poverty program. And it has worked before. The cumulative economic benefits from public research into rice are running at almost $20 billion a year, hundreds of times the cost of the investment.

I'm sufficiently amazed at those figures. In fact, I have no quarrel with the position of The Economist on the need for more rice research, and if I may add, I myself can see the need not only for wet weather-resistant rice but also for dry weather-resistant rice.

I'm also sufficiently amused that The Economist looks at the necessity of billions of dollars more for research on the technology of rice, while I a UP non-economist graduate from the world of rice technology look at the necessity of billions of dollars more for research on the economics of rice. it must be that when something is right under your nose, you can't see it.

Yes, I am calling for another and different rice revolution, the 1st Brain Grain Revolution. Our months-long of ARCCESS consultancy work with the agrarian reform farmers of Pangasinan and La Union so far has shown us definitely that farmers have to learn more than they know about managing their farming, not just repeating their farmer's practice, even good agricultural practices, year in and year out. I believe that it is time for funding institutions and individuals to generate millions of dollars more to support economists and non-economists to do more research on how not simply to fill up the poor farmers' pockets today with more money – more today, gone tomorrow – but how to fully and finally emancipate the poor rice farmers from poverty. It has to do with sustainability.

And, surprise, we can learn from the Africans, and from another grain crop, the pearl millet. Learning from other sources, the economic lessons towards emancipation from poverty are, as I see them:

1st, it's a financing scheme.
For the farmers to make more money.
2nd, it's a marketing scheme.
For the farmers to make even more money.
3rd, it's a partnership for a financing-marketing scheme.
For the farmers to make even more money – and continually.

Farmers are the same everywhere, whether in Naguilian or Nigeria: they sell right after harvest to pay off loans. And, more often than not, they sell to the moneylender, or input lender, with high interest rates, sometimes reaching 80% or even higher. The farmers don't remotely think like economists; I think they just think opportunity cost, even if they can't define that to save their lives.

In the late 1990s, FAO helped poor Nigerian farmers form groups so that they could bargain for better deals for inputs like seeds and fertilizers (ANS, 12 April 2010, fao.org/news). Economies of scale. The problem was that the farmers' economies were depleted: The farmers had no money to buy anything at all!

We learn that FAO had to think again. In 1999, FAO introduced a variation of warrantage, or inventory credit system, borrowing from the European farmers of the 19th century. Under warrantage, a farmer could use his harvest as collateral for credit from a bank. So, applying for credit, Nigerian farmer borrowers left their produce in a locked warehouse with keys held by both the bank and their group. The loans gave the poor farmers the power to buy their essential inputs for the next planting season as well as tide them over up to the lean months – gawat in Ilocano – when food stocks run low and food prices run high.

When the lean months came, the farmer borrowers pulled out their harvest from the warehouse, sold their produce, made good money, repaid their loans, and enjoyed what was left that was theirs. That makes me feel good. This one makes me feel better: ANS says, "Using part of the credit to finance other income-generating activities, many farmers managed to repay their loans even before selling their crop."If you help the farmers help themselves, they will not only survive – they will thrive.

The lesson there, as FAO's rural finance expert Ake Oloffsson sees it, is that there are 3 elements that need to be in place for warrantage to succeed: (a) a farmer's group working well, (b) a concerned local bank, and (c) a safe place to store the produce.

This is getting more interesting. We'll go back to Oloffsson a little later.

That takes care of the financing scheme, Lesson (1).

We go now to the marketing scheme, Lesson (2). And from yet another part of Africa with yet another grain.

In 2010, ICRISAT & Partners introduced a new strategy for village growth they referred to as inclusive market-oriented development, or IMOD. This strategy empowered farmers with "scientific innovations, supportive policies and strong partnerships" (2010, icrisat.org). On the 4th of February 2014, Director General William Dar of ICRISAT spoke at the GFIA 2014, saying (trust.org):

If we want to resolve the global food crisis and grow food more sustainably, we need to first find solutions for the millions of farming families surviving on less than one hectare in the southern hemisphere. They are the ones producing more than half the world’s food, while paradoxically make up most of the under-nourished.

In Tanzania, poor sorghum farmers organized a cooperative that benefitted them in the form of training in modern ways of growing sorghum, storage, managing inputs and marketing (iCRiSAT Watch, bogspot.com). They had a contract farming deal with the World Food Program under ICRISAT's Project HOPE funded by the Gates Foundation. William Dar also said, "NGOs also have a big role to play in connecting farming families to the market."

And now we come to the financing-marketing scheme, Lesson (3).

That is where our concept of the Super Coops come in. We are now going back to the ABC of Oloffsson: farmer's group, local bank, and storehouse. We call them Super Coops because they are not your usual coops; they are redesigned to pursue ICRISAT's strategy called IMOD. A Super Coop is composed of a board whose membership reflect a partnership of these sectors: public (government), private (business) philanthropic (do-gooders), patriotic (civil society), popular (NGOs and POs), pastoral (religious), and peasant (farmers). All working for one, one working for all.

Aside from that and more importantly, the Super Coop is the marketing arm of the members. This is what is missing in Oloffsson's ABC of the economic factors for success: the farmer's group doing the marketing himself. The Super Coop not only supplies the inputs to the farmers at affordable rates; it assumes the role of the trader himself; it deals with direct consumers, not with merchants or wholesale buyers. That way, the Super Coop gathers all the values along the production to marketing chain and, subsequently, distributes the same to the members. The outside merchants can always take care of themselves.

So I say we need ABCD to succeed. With the Super Coop (Oloffsson's A) providing credit in times of production and in times of stress (Oloffsson's B), providing the warehouse in times of need (Oloffsson's C), and with the Super Coop itself marketing the produce (Hilario's D), the coop will then be continually providing the proper added values to the farmers' labors – happily, the Super Coop will be able to emancipate the poor farmers from poverty.

If the Super Coop deals with rice, it is time to call this seed the Brain Grain. In another sense, Golden Rice by IRRI is a Brain Grain because it supplies vitamin A that is good for the eyes without which the brain is essentially dead, but I see that it's not enough if the family's financial future looks dim.

Now then, I'm dreaming of $1 billion as fund to support 169 pre-qualified model coops in 13 countries in the drylands of Africa and Asia to receive grants for research into Super Coops working with generous loans on the Brain Grain. Coops are how you connect with community for economic support this way and that, a give and take proposition. Our coops need advocates and access to credit from production to marketing as if the good life in the poor drylands depends on them, because it does.

And now, A Gospel of Abundance according to Frank H:

Brain Grain must not only generate a continuous supply of a substance that is good for the eyes but along with that generate a continuous & generous supply of a substance that is good for the pockets. More today, more tomorrow!

MANILA: Brendon Burchard, one of the most prolific and most encouraging personal-power gurus on the planet, one of the #1 New York Times bestselling authors with his earlier books The Charge, The Millionaire Manager and Life’s Golden Ticket, has written another would-be blockbuster brainteaser he calls The Motivation Manifesto with the subtitle 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power, published by Hay House Inc (Carlsbad, California, 2014, 234 pages).

The Motivation Manifesto is meant to be read – also literally, in front of a mirror. Try and read it to yourself.

Reading silently alone, you will find it poetic and powerful; while it’s self-conscious when it copies from the US Declaration of Independence, it works even with me, and I have very high standards for writing. (By the way, I must thank Ela Carrillo for lending her copy.)

The Motivation Manifesto is all about personal freedom. The first part is powerful enough for me, “The Declaration Of Personal Power” (ix-xix). I love how it begins:

“There comes a time in the lives of those destined for greatness when we must stand before the mirror of meaning and ask: Why, having been endowed with the courageous heart of a lion, do we live as mice?”

We must read before The Mirror of Meaning. “We must declare our personal power and freedom,” Burchard says. To claim personal power, we must first feel free to build it:

We must choose to feel again. We must set intentions for who we are, for what roles we wish to serve, for how we’ll relate with the world. Without a vibrant awareness, we cannot connect with others or ourselves, nor can we meet the demands of the hour with grace. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL MEET LIFE WITH FULL PRESENCE AND POWER.

We must engage life; we have to fight for joy, power, satisfaction, even if we have to take the bull by the horn:

We are often detached from what is most worth fighting for; our busywork consumes our day but it is not our life’s work. Most do not feel a stark, stirring life purpose – they don’t hunger for it in the morning or orient their day to its pursuit. A life of greater joy, power, and satisfaction awaits those who consciously design their life. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL RECLAIM OUR AGENDA.

We must step out of our comfort zones and challenge ourselves with discomfort; we must master ourselves:

Our internal demons poison us with worry and fear whenever we might be vulnerable, stunting our growth and vitality. Our destiny is decided by how well we know our demons of Doubt and Delay, how well we defend against them, and how many battles we win against them each day of our lives. Without self-mastery, we are slaves to fear. With it, greatness and transcendence are ours. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL DEFEAT OUR DEMONS.

We must act, not simply intend to act; we must be proactive, not simply reactive:

We must remember we are not the sum of our intentions but of our actions. Bold and disciplined initiative is our savior; it allows us to rise, to leap, to soar to the heights of true greatness. We must not lose the urgency of this moment as it begs for us to begin something grand and important. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL ADVANCE WITH ABANDON.

So what if we are drained and exhausted? We must get up and be glad; we must laugh and live and give thanks:

Why do we not hear more laughter and life? Where is the vibrant, mad fury and passion of the fully engaged human? Where are the people burning with charisma and joy and imagination? Where is the appreciation for life’s spark? We must reexamine our attitude toward life. Our supreme duty must be to rekindle the magic of life. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL PRACTICE JOY AND GRATITUDE.

We must not give up on what we believe in; we must be brave:

We must not follow any impulse to be weak or heartless. Instead we must have a strong refusal to break, choosing that mighty lift of courage, that soaring commitment to love, that proud ascent to the realm of character that is congruent with out highest values. Freedom and victory belong to those who remain true and strong despite temptation. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL NOT BREAK OUR INTEGRITY.

We must learn to love to the fullest so that there is no room for hurts:

We have allowed our awareness of love to diminish, that is all. In doing so, we have caused our own suffering. We must mature and realize that freeing our mind of ancient hurts and opening once more to love shall give us access to divine strength. To stand emotionally open before the world and give of our hearts without fear of hurt or demand of reciprocity – this is the ultimate act of human courage. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL AMPLIFY LOVE.

Let us be leaders to emulate and challenge the world:

We must do better. From the squalor of a contaminated moral environment must surface an honorable few, unafraid to challenge the direction of the world. History shall fill in the wake of our actions, so let us be purposeful and let us be great. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL INSPIRE GREATNESS.

We must enjoy life to the fullest and let time worry about us:

We must s-l-o-w it all down, not just to become more present in the singular moment, but also to elongate that moment so that we truly sense it. Life is meant to be a vibrant, deeply felt, growing mosaic of long, meaningful moments. This day is to be enjoyed like a pause at a cool stream during summer’s heat. For this, we now declare: WE SHALL SLOW TIME.

Burchard warns us:

Some will stand in our way, but we mustn’t hide or minimize ourselves any longer. Let us believe faithfully that our dreams are worth any struggle and that it is our time to free ourselves and rise to glory.

Good Friday reminds us we must die to ourselves. Yes, The Motivation Manifesto is enough for us to change ourselves inside out. But then we would still be incomplete. What we would have is only personal power. What then?

I say with The Motivation Manifesto, you will reach only half the promise of greatness. To complete the journey of transformation, the book calls for a sequel, still along the thoughts of Brendon Burchard:

THE ACTIVATION MANIFESTO.
9 Preparations To Fulfill Your Heart’s Desires:
To Live, To Love, To Matter.

My personal activation manifesto states that I must rise to greatness in the name of a private gain always within a public good.

I volunteered and what you find below (dated 12 April 2015, with a little editing, all italicized), was to be my sharing during the last rites over his body, but I wasn't able to catch up from Pangasinan to deliver it. It's not your usual eulogy. I had asked Manny Garcia to deliver it for me and he said yes, but at the last minute, he realized it can only be delivered by me, and he was right. Manny and his wife Marie, Ben and his wife Alice, Danny & Bing Labadan, Archie & Dory Resurreccion, Kiko & Jing Reyes, Ruben & Yett Layug and many others were classmates of mine and my wife Ampy in Marriage Encounter #4 sponsored by the Bukás Lóob sa Díyos in Los Baños held in Tagaytay City in January 1991 (Doming & Charito Santos were our Class Shepherds; Charito is now also gone). I have always admitted that ME4 saved our marriage. It's been 24 years since our ME4; January 2016 and we will be celebrating our ME4 Silver Anniversary. With Ampy, I was able to attend the Catholic Church rite when they put the ashes into a niche at the St Therese of the Child Jesus chapel's columbarium across the campus of UP Los Baños. Those of us who are alive are grateful to God for whatever we have because we can still have them, including friends who understand us. You thank God while you can. – Frank A Hilario

Ben Capiral was the one who arranged for my being a member of the Knights of Columbus, First Degree and, later, Second Degree. He was also very active in the formation of the St Augustine (Bay, Laguna) KC chapter where I became the PRO. He also arranged for my insurance and was kind enough to pay for the premium when I could not pay at deadline time. I don't remember thanking him. Thank you, Ben.

We must remember to give thanks to people who are kind to us. I didn't see Ben for many years, not because we quarreled but because his interests were different from mine. We did not have many ME4 reunions either. But this January, we had two. That was because Ferdie Moneda came back from New Zealand, minus his wife Ana, who had died earlier. Ferdie stayed for several days and we had two ME4 reunions, not just one, the first when he was newly arrived, the second when he was about to leave again. Ferdie was thanking us profusely for doing those two reunions in his name, both in Ben and Alice's home. We were all having a good time doing the karaoke on both occasions, singing old songs of Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, among others. How would we know that it would be the last time we would see Ben Capiral alive? He had volunteered for the annual Walk for Life of the Knights and collapsed later, never recovering.

Last year I think, Ben was telling me about how he had suffered 2 or 3 or 4 strokes, I don't quite remember the number. But he recovered from all those strokes. Miracles I must say. Afterwards, he looked quite normal, no limp and no speech impediment at all. No stutter. He told me it was because of continued body massage and the will to go back to normal. At one point, he could not speak normally anymore, as if he never learned to speak. It must have been frustrating, but Ben persisted, and he succeeded. By vocalizing he went back to normal speech and by the time I met him, I did not notice any speech abnormality at all. Miracles happen to those who help God make miracles happen.

When I learned about that, I began telling friends and acquaintances who had themselves or who knew people who had suffered a stroke to behave and believe like Ben Capiral. Do the body massage and do your vocalizations if you have to. You have to struggle. A stroke is not the end of the world, unless you give up.

So you see, Ben Capiral had had his number of miracles. Plural. What is the lesson from Ben for us? If you ask me, miracles happen when you play a good part of the process of healing. God helps those who help themselves make miracles. Why not? Don't forget that your body is a temple of God.

This month, April 2015, Ben Capiral ran out of miracles.

That is because he never stopped smoking. Whenever I passed by the house, I always saw him sitting by that tennis table, smoking. If you don't stop smoking, smoking will stop you.

There are two other lessons I would like to tell you. I have a friend, a doctor, who wrote his autobiography in 2005 yet, titled Give Me The Flowers ... Now! He is alive, 91 years old; he wants to "go" but I have been "discouraging" him. He has a Living Will, and his sons and daughters know it. The will says that when it's time for him to go, let him go. No heroic efforts to revive him, no CPR, no ICU, no vegetative state. His family can afford an extended stay in the hospital, but they have to consider the quality of life if they prolonged their daddy's life.

Remember: "Give Me The Flowers ... Now!" Do not wait for tomorrow to say the corny lines like

"I THANK YOU."
"I AM PROUD OF YOU."
"I LOVE YOU."
"I FORGIVE YOU."

To forgive is the most difficult thing to do; I should know – it took me many, many years. If you cannot forgive, it's like you have a stutter and cannot speak properly. But like Ben Capiral, I persisted with my stutter and I was able to forgive my family, not the least myself. God forgives those who forgive.

So now, I say to all of you:

I LOVE YOU!
I FORGIVE YOU!

MANILA: I feel frustrated. Very frustrated. Our fighter Manny Pacquiao lost by a unanimous decision to flamboyant Floyd Mayweather in their so-called Fight of the Century at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Losing is a sinking feeling; losing big is a capsizing feeling.

I protest: That was not a fight! Manny was invading all the while Floyd was evading. There was no clash of titans, only a clash of styles. One was to dance, the other was to pounce. He won by disengaging, not engaging.

It was a clash of wills. One willed to fight, the other willed to flee. It "was anything but a thriller," Robert Morales said (03 May 2015, dailynews.com). I say it was a chiller. "The only thrilling thing about this fight was the noise Pacquiao's fans made when they thought he was landing punches." They were landing on air.

"I outboxed him," Floyd said. No, Floyd, you outfoxed him. Pacquiao said:

It (was) a good fight. I thought I won the fight. He didn't do anything. He moved outside. I got him more times with a lot of punches and I thought I won the fight. I was never hurt. I was very surprised at the scores.

It doesn't matter if the judges stole the fight from Manny Pacquiao. It wasn't a fight. Pacquiao didn't lose a fight – there was none.

"Perhaps history will not record it as a great fight," Dan Rafael said (03 May 2015, espn.go.com). "Floyd Mayweather stands alone. Unified welterweight world champion. The pound-for-pound best. And king of the era." Yes, it was a great flight. Yes, Floyd Mayweather stands alone, Darth Evader. Winner yes, champion no. Pound-for-pound the best? No, no-pound-for-pound the best. And King of the Era of the Rope Runners.

Of the many journalists reporting on the match, only Robert Morales had it right when he wasn't paying attention; the title of his article is, "Defensive Mayweather earns unanimous decision over Pacquiao" (cited). Floyd Mayweather had made the art of turning defense as the best defense, not offense. Floyd taught Manny and the world a foxing lesson, not the boxing lesson that everyone wanted. If Floyd had fought, he would have been the boxing lesson.

David Wharton & Lance Pugmire said (03 May 2015, latimes.com):

It was a night when the science part of the sweet science prevailed. Quickness and smarts. Movement and accuracy. Floyd Mayweather Jr employed all of his trademark boxing skills to outfox a determined but ultimately frustrated Manny Pacquiao, winning the so-called "Fight of the Century" at the MGM Grand on Saturday.

You call evasive tactics science prevailing in the boxing ring? No wonder Floyd Mayweather has been undefeated – he has not been fighting, only frustrating his opponents. He is not a great fighter; he is a great flighter.

Quickness and smarts? "He's moving around," Pacquiao said. "It's not easy to throw a lot of punches." Dancing is quick and smart if you want to avoid confrontation.

Movement and accuracy? "I got him many times," Pacquiao said. "I thought I won the fight."

Did boxing science prevail? Wharton & Pugmire themselves said, "As the seconds ticked down (in the 11th round), Mayweather danced in circles, waving his fist in the air." In fact, he was dancing in circles most of the 12 rounds.

It wasn't a fight; it was a fright. I'm afraid Floyd Mayweather promised a great fight and lost his will when he finally met Manny Pacquiao. There wasn't any heavy damage to either fighter – there had been no slugging out of which would have emerged the one who was the better boxer. The braggart would not box.

Because of that, the promoters lost. How can there be a rematch when there was no match in the first place?

"The 11th round was all Mayweather as he boxed circles around Pacquiao, landing a nice stiff right uppercut, several jabs and a right cross or two. These were not vicious blows, but they were enough" (Morales as cited). In fact, boxing in circles is what Mayweather did most of the night. No engagement. You win in a running-away match and you feel proud?

After the decision was announced, ANN said, "There (was) an audible grumble in the MGM Grand Garden Arena crowd as the fans (made) their way to the exits — not so much for the decision, but for the visceral disappointment when a fight doesn't end with heavy damage to either fighter" (author not named, bostonherald.com). The Fight of the Century turned out to be The Flight of the Century. "The crowd booed the final decision." Shame on you, Floyd Mayweather!

"I outboxed him," Mayweather said. "He never figured out my jab and my right hand." No, Floyd, Manny never figured out your evasive tactics. He was no Luke Skywalker to your Darth Evader. The Force was with Manny, The Farce was with you.

"Between rounds," Pacquiao's trainer Freddie Roach said, "I asked for more combinations from Manny. I thought he fought flat-footed a little too much." Manny was frustrated that he was aggressive while Floyd was regressive.

George Willis said, "It was a compelling but not overly thrilling fight. It was more of a chess match than the brawl Pacquiao would have preferred" (03 May 2015, nypost.com). Boring. Mayweather is a great borer, not boxer.

Robert Morales said, "With all the almost unbelievable hype that went with Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao finally getting it on in the ring, it would have been terrible if the fight turned out to be a dud" (cited). It was a dud, for crying out loud! Robert, you yourself said, "with Mayweather fighting only in spurts." Just for the points. "Pacquiao was the aggressor. He wanted to throw down in a big way, but Mayweather had other ideas. This is not so surprising because Mayweather is much better defensively than offensively." Like I said, in Floyd's battle plan, the best offense is defense.

Mitch Abramson said, "The so-called Fight of the Century may have not lived up to the crazy hype that preceded it" (03 May 2015, nydailynews.com). That's putting it mildly. It was The Flight of the Century with a steal worth $180 million. It was crazy because it wasn't crazy. No knockdowns and you call it a fight? No knockout and you call it the performance of a champion? Today, Mayweather redefined a battle of champions as one side eluding the enemy and the other side never punishing him. The low show wasn't worth the high price of the tickets. Blame it on the Non-Fighter of the Century.

Isn't Floyd Mayweather the greatest? The greatest Darth Evader ever.

The US Supreme Court declared on Friday, 26 June 2015, that same-sex "marriage" is legal in all 50 states of the United States. Writing the narrow majority 5-4 opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, referring to homosexual pairs, "They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right" (Bill Chappell, 26 June 2015, npr.org). That's a prevarication. Dissenting, Chief Justice John Roberts said (26 June 2015, medium.com):

If you are among the many Americans  – of whatever sexual orientation  – who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.

And I celebrate marriage between a male and a female, man and woman, boy and girl. For our entertainment, let me quote you lover William Shakespeare's sonnet, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" and let me show you how much we can learn from it (shakespeare-online.com):

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

And now, let's watch Shakespeare in love! Thinking of the US Supreme Court justices who are thinking out of the box of love, stop, look & listen to this British mastermind:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

If indeed a man with another man can be married together, or a woman with another woman, it is a marriage of true minds that cannot claim sanity. How can there be sparks of love when there are no opposites that can attract, only similarities, samenesses, mismatches? Same-sex "marriage" is in violation of even the law of magnetism; in love as in magnetism, unlike poles attract, like poles repel each other.

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Admit the impediments, my God! Make love, not war. When a man "makes love" to another man, the science of anatomy says they can do nothing but swordplay, and both will get hurt, not high. Or they can choose to horse around pretending to be horses. But the male anus was meant for downloading, not uploading! The female was meant for receiving, not giving; in making love, not war, it is better for the woman to receive than to give!

When a woman "makes love" to another woman, the science of anatomy says they can do nothing but play cymbals. There is no consummation, only consumption. They might make music, but only they can appreciate or hear. In any case, that would be forbidden music.

Which alters when it alteration finds,

What does a man find when he "marries" another man and sees that the other man is not a man but an altered woman and cannot alter that fact? Love hurts! What does a woman find when she "marries" another woman and sees that the other woman is not a woman but an altered man and cannot alter that fact? Love hurts! Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Of course, when a man and a woman make proper love, never mind where and what time, they have to bend to remove things that hinder movements and moments of love. Such anticipation, such a joy!

What happens when a man bends to remove the other man's things and finds that he is looking at a mirror of himself? I suppose the best thing to do is to switch off the light. Such a jerk! What happens when a woman bends to remove the other woman's things and finds that she is looking at a mirror of herself? I suppose the best thing to do is switch off the mind. Such a dork!

O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,

Of course, it's an ever-fixed mark! As a husband of 38 years, I have always known that, unerringly. I'm a man and you're a woman, and you know what I mean and I know what you mean. When you say, "Kiss me," I know where my lips must go. Do you want a 5-minute kiss? So do I. When you say, "Now!" I know exactly where you're driving at, or I am. No deviations, no missing the mark, please. There is no substitute for making love. If you don't believe me, you haven't done it yourself.

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

In any marriage, there are always tempests – actually, it takes one to tempt the other to anger. What happens if the man who "marries" another man finds something revolting in his partner? He cannot say, "You motherfucker!" because, pardon the expression, each one is in fact a fatherfucker. What happens if the woman who "marries" another woman finds something disgusting in her partner? She cannot say, "You motherfucker!" because that will be calling the kettle black, and she knows she is another kettle.

It is the star to every wandering bark,

True marriage is the star that guides every wandering ship, or sheep. What happens if a man strays from the other man he has "married"? I don't know. What I can tell you is that he cannot lose his virginity – he already did. What happens if a woman strays from the other woman she has "married"? She has a big, big problem: She cannot be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal that she wants to be!

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

What is his weight in gold the man who "marries" another man, or the woman who "marries" another woman? Gold means "generous and giving, compassionate and loving, benefactor or patron, sharing wisdom, knowledge and wealth" (empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com). The man, or woman, cannot give of oneself because s/he is already and simply a duplicate!

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

You think that over time, the man will learn to love the other man as his "better half" and the woman will learn to love the other woman as her "better half"? That is against logic. None of them is half – I told you everyone is whole!

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

The sickle of death comes sooner or later. What happens to the man who "married" another man? He will be judged in Hell. What happens to the woman who "married" another woman? She will be judged in Heaven and sent to Hell anyway. You can't take God away from all this, even if the US Supreme Court did, even if Filipino supergirl Angel Locsin insists to keep God out of this. "For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife" (Mark 10: 7 New Revised Standard Version). "For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (New American Standard Bible). How can a man become one flesh with another man, a woman with another woman? Even God will have to give up on them.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

Of course, a man can love another man and a woman another woman, but it's an entirely different ballgame when it comes to having sexual intercourse. You can't make love with a colored pencil using another colored pencil; neither can you make love with two roses smashing each other! In true love, the hours are too brief, the weeks are too long.

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

Of course, you can love anyone to the end of time, but a man who "marries" another man and a woman who "marries" another woman cannot say truly, "Till death do us part," because God did not make them one – only they did, and they are not Almighty.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

If you can prove that William Shakespeare was mistaken in this sonnet, then you can say William Shakespeare was not the best playwright the world has ever seen, and no one has ever loved at all. And I never enjoyed writing this!

MANILA: Yes, I said it's movable. And I’ll show you. But it's not like Manila 5th District Representative Amado Bagatsing's moving proposal.

The National Commission for Culture & the Arts (NCCA) says about the proposal of Bagatsing "to turn the Rizal statue 180 degrees to resolve the Torre de Manila controversy" that it is not moveable. Evelyn Macairan quotes NCCA Legal Counsel Trixie Cruz-Angeles as saying (03 July 2015, philstar.com):

Monuments are not movable. The purpose why they were put there, their location and their structure are not accidents. They are put there for their specific purpose and they have their own symbolism. The (Rizal) monument was not intended to recreate where he was facing when he was shot… the symbolism why he is turned away from the people… is a position of leadership. He is in front; he is not facing his people; he is leading them. You have to give this site the respect it is due because Rizal is buried there.

I said the Rizal statue is movable, but with a big difference.

Bagatsing had suggested that Rizal be turned around front to back to face the City of Manila instead of Manila Bay, so that it cannot be said that the Torre de Manila, which is right in front of the monument, detracts & subtracts from Rizal's view of the Bay; no one can then distract Rizal's whole view of the City. And so that the doubt of some historians can be erased that the monument's position right now is "an indication that Rizal was a traitor" to his people, his back behind turned toward the City. (Actually, they want the Rizal statue moved such to negate the fact that the Torre de Manila is the national hero's photobomber.)

Miss Trixie is logical and wrong! Read again what she has just said: "He is in front; he is not facing his people (the City); he is leading them." Therefore, the message is movement; today, we need only to debate where Jose Rizal is leading us to. So I agree a little with Manila Rep Bagatsing and disagree wholly with NCCA Counsel Cruz-Angeles; I believe that the Rizal monument is a moveable feast for the eyes.

Of course Rizal is movable!

To turn or not to turn, that is the question. To where should Rizal be pointing today? With the power of global positioning system (GPS) up there in the sky to pinpoint exact locations with the accuracy of within a millimeter anywhere in the world, all we have to do is debate nationally – and, incidentally, learn more about our national hero's peregrinations – where we want the Rizal monument to point to. So, GPS where to?

(1)     Roman Catholic Church, Calamba City – and thereby to hate? I remember the story where Rizal's mother was in confession when suddenly there was a loud cry from a baby. It was Jose in her mother's womb – did he want to be born inside the church? Later, under the umbrella of European liberalism, he would leave the Catholic Church and its dogmas. I believe he was wrong; in his novel Noli Me Tangere,he was equating the teachings of the Catholic Church with the excesses of the friars in his country. Or, which is the same, Jose Rizal did not learn to hate the sin but not the sinner.

(2)     Dagupan City – and thereby to learn about love? This is in Pangasinan; the old cathedral was where Leonor Rivera and the English railroad engineer Henry Kipping were married in 1890 (Gabriel Cardinoza, onlinehome.us). Leonor was Rizal's first love-break. And his immortal friend Ferdinand Blumentritt urged him to forget her, because she was not as worthy as Filipinas.

(3)     Ancestral House, Calamba City – and thereby to love the Filipino language? Rizal was born in Calamba, Laguna, on 19 June 1861. Unfortunately, now a City, Calamba today seems disoriented, as it has in its logo Mt Makiling, when it is the town of Los Baños nearby that owns this legendary mountain, not Calamba. The ancestral home, which is now the Rizal Shrine, is at the Calamba town proper, right next to the Roman Catholic Church across the street. And in the little hut in the yard behind the ancestral house, the boy Jose wrote his poem "Sa Aking Mga Kabata" (To The Kids Of My Own Time). When I translated into English this boy poem, I found that Filipinos have been misinterpreting the poem, saying this poem was about love of the Tagalog language, when in fact it was about love of freedom! Not one of our historians, Filipino or foreigner saw this; only this non-historian saw it – see my essay, "Rizal Misunderstood" (08 June 2014, A Magazine Called Love, blogspot.com). It has taken a non-Tagalog (an Ilocano) to figure it out. Let not our biases lead us to veneration without understanding.

(4)     Bay, Laguna – and thereby to appreciate agriculture and modern knowledge? Jose Rizal must have visited his brother Paciano who lived here because he was tending the family's sugarcane farm, the land rented from the Dominican friars. Sugarcane was the source of income of the Rizals that enabled the family to send Jose to study abroad, the first famous OFW – overseas Filipino wanderer. He visited many countries to learn the best in them, but they were 50 years ahead of their time.

(5)     Madrid – and thereby to study religiously? Jose lived in Calle Amor de Dios from 12 September 1882 to May 1883, prepared to lead a Spartan life as he had a limited allowance of 50 pesos a month when the sugarcane harvest was good, further limited to 35 pesos when the harvest was bad (philembassymadrid.com). An apt Calle Amor de Dios, Boulevard for Love of God, asJose was a very religious boy; I said was. It was walking distance from the Universidad de Madrid, where he studied medicine. He was literally taking steps towards his education.

(6)     Barcelona – and thereby to betrayal? On 08 April 2011, the Philippine Consulate General in Barcelona inaugurated the "Sala Jose Rizal" room at the Montjuic Castle where Jose Rizal was unjustly brought and imprisoned (MRT/JV, 15 April 2011, gmanetwork.com). Did you know that this was the time he was on his way to Cuba as a volunteer doctor and the Spanish authorities had approved such a request? Who betrayed Rizal? You betray your friend when you no longer understand or appreciate him.

(7)     Wilhelmsfeld, Germany – and thereby to overkill? There is a Jose Rizal Park at Wilhelmsfeld, whose vicariate Jose stayed as the guest of Pastor Karl Ullmer for 2 months in 1886, and where he finished his novel Noli Me Tangere (ufreytag.michel-media.de). Protestant territory; it seems fitting, as the Noli was anti-Roman Catholic, even if the author did not realize that its effect would be that.

(8)     Belgium – and thereby to power struggle? From Paris, Rizal arrived in Brussels, Belgium and stayed from 02 February 1890 to 31 July 1890 (joserizal.ph). He had disengaged himself from the management of La Solidaridad, "only resting and giving others the opportunity to use their pen"– he kept on writing for the paper anyway. In fact, Marcelo H del Pilar had grabbed the editorship of the paper from him, and the funds that came all the way from Manila. When funds get in the way, it isn't fun to write anymore even for your country.

(9)     London – and thereby to love? Jose Rizal had a fling in London by the name of Gertrude Beckett (Jensen DG Mañebog, ourhappyschool.com). "She helped Jose Rizal mix his colors for painting and prepared the clay for his sculpturing, hoping that a colorful romantic relationship would be formed between them." It was May 1888. With her help, Jose finished his sculptural pieces like Prometheus Bound, The Triumph of Death over Life, and The Triumph of Science over Death. Gertrude fell in love with Jose, but he did not reciprocate. He left on 19 March 1889 so she could forget him. From 1889 to 1890, Rizal spent several months in London doing historical research on pre-Spanish Philippines (islandsentinel.com). Not that he loved Gertrude less but that he loved Filipinas more.

(10)Japan – and thereby to love but not to forget one's true love? Jose Rizal visited Japan and cultivated the friendship-love of O Sei San, a Japanese samurai's daughter, who taught him the Japanese art of painting (su-mie) and helped him with his Japanese (joserizal.ph). He was in love again, yet he moved on, as he had another love he would not forsake.

(11)Paris – and thereby to doing one's research well? Here he is writing the sequel to the Noli, which is the Fili. He sends a letter to his friend Mariano Ponce, to whom he says, "I have the manuscript" (joserizal.nhcp.gov.ph). He is referring to his annotation of Antonio Morga's book Sucesos de Las Islas Filipinas. He is ending one and beginning another. In his annotation, Jose Rizal showed that Filipinos had developed their own culture even before the coming of the Spanish conquistadores (joserizal.ph). Morga had not done his homework at all.

(12)Ateneo – and thereby to learn from a student? In his diary, Jose wrote, "(One) professor was a model of uprightness, earnestness, and devotion to the progress of his pupils; and such was his zeal that I, who scarcely spoke middling Spanish, was able after a short time to write it fairly well. His name was Francisco de Paula Sanchez. With his aid, I studied mathematics, rhetoric, and Greek to some advantage. Father Sanchez was a penetrating observer, although rather pessimistic, always looking at the bad side of things. When we were in school we used to call him a 'dark spirit,' and the students nicknamed him Paniki, which is a kind of bat" (ateneo.edu). When Rizal chucked his devotion to Mother Mary and the rest of the Catholic Church, Father Sanchez was the one who tried to coax him back to his old faith. He failed because, reading those letters, I can see he was acting as if he was talking to his student back at the Ateneo! Some teachers never learn!

(13)UST – and thereby to learn about racial prejudice? In 1878, Jose Rizal enrolled in medicine at the University of Santo Tomas, but decided to stop when he realized that the Filipino students were victims of racial prejudice by their Dominican friar-instructors (Teofilo H Montemayor, joserizal.ph). He dramatized this in his chapter "A Class In Physics" in the Fili. You discriminate to hide your lack of self-worth.

(14)Laguna Lake – and thereby to learn about fighting City Hall? There was the time when the Rizal family and the rest of the farmers were at loggerheads with the local friars who had ordered that 80% of their harvest be surrendered to the Church (thinkorbebeaten.com). They were all renting land from the friars.Rizal's father refused and, of course, the other farmers refused. I know Rizal helped write the farmers' petition against the friars. When the father died, 4 days later, the corpse was excavated and thrown into the lake, which outraged Jose Rizal. Hell knows no fury like the friars spurned.

(15)Dapitan – and thereby to settle down? Rizal built 3 houses in his exile in this part of Mindanao: the square was home for him, mother, sister Trinidad, and nephew; the octagonal for his young boy students, and the hexagonal for his chickens (joserizal.ph). "From my house, I hear the murmur of a clear brook, which comes from the high rocks."It must have been music to his ears.

Will repositioning his Luneta monument to our heart's desire break Jose Rizal's heart? I sincerely don't think so. The national debate on the new GPS positioning of his monument will delight him no end. Because then people will start talking about him again, about:

his likes, loves and hates;

his young boy's message on language and love of freedom;

revolution devouring its own children;

studying for the good of one's country;
nationalism and internationalism;

making sacrifices.

Moving the Rizal monument would be another sacrifice.

Still, as a compromise, we can reengineer the base of the monument so that it will point to all places in the world – it will turn around ever so slowly and completely from sunrise to sunset! Remember: Jose Rizal was not a nationalist; rather, he was an internationalist!

MANILA: Packed with 40 plus songs, the touring show LET IT BE: A Celebration Of The Music Of The Beatles was presented 08 February 2015 at the Centrepointe Theatre in Ottawa in Canada. The international show, starting in September 2012, musically charts the band's meteoric rise through the heart of Beatlemania and on to their studio compositions (centrepointetheatre.com). The show has played in London for 2 1/2 years and toured all across the United Kingdom (Chris Jones, 19 February 2015, chicagotribune.com).

45 years ago: After the often fractious sessions for the White Album in 1968, Paul McCartney realized The Beatles were in danger of disintegrating if they continued to work independently of each other. He hit upon the idea of filming a television special in front of an audience; Paul is quoted as saying (beatlesbible.com):

We started Let It Be in January 1969 at Twickenham Studios, under the working title Get Back. Michael Lindsay Hogg was the Director. The idea was that you'd see The Beatles rehearsing, jamming, getting their act together and then finally performing somewhere in a big end-of-show concert. We would show how the whole process worked. I remember I had an idea for the final scene, which would be a massive tracking shot, forever and ever, and then we'd be in the concert.

This was to be a continuation of the back-to-the-basics ethos that the group had adopted since Lady Madonna in February 1968. "Let It Be was supposed to be the album that would bring the Beatles back together again," doing live performances (Michael Gallucci, 08 May 2015, ultimateclassicrock.com). They recorded in London's Twickenham Film Studios, and then at their own Apple Studios, during the first month of 1969, "to respark their dying flame." No outside visitors, no bullshit. They called it Get Back. Says Michael:

There are great songs – "Two Of Us,""I've Got A Feeling,""Get Back" (a different mix of the song reached #1 in 1969 – scattered among the ruins. It's a fascinating work, no matter how you hear it (the album was remixed in 2003 as Let It Be ... Naked, with Spector's often intrusive production removed). It's the sound of a band falling apart. It's the sound of a band trying to hold together. And it's the sound of an era ending.

The album: Let It Be is the 12th and final studio album by the Beatles, released on 08 May 1970, almost a month after the group's break-up. Like most of the band's previous releases, it was a #1 album in many countries, including the US and the UK, and was released in tandem with the motion picture of the same title. It was Paul McCartney's idea. The recording made little or no use of studio artifice or multiple overdubbing, to allow the group to return to their roots as a true ensemble. This idea mirrored the "back to the basics" attitude of a number of rock musicians at that time in reaction to the psychedelic and progressive music dominant in the previous 2 years. The concert itself would be filmed for broadcast on worldwide television, with the album released to coincide with it. "The whole Let It Be project was really to see work in progress, to see the Beatles working"– Paul McCartney, thebeatles.com). Working again.

The ballad: "Let It Be" is a song by the Beatles, released in March 1970 as a single and (in an alternate mix) as the title track of their album Let It Be. At the time, it had the highest debut on the Billboard Hot 100, reaching #6. It was written and sung by Paul McCartney. It was their final single before McCartney announced his departure from the band. Both the Let It Be album and the US single "The Long And Winding Road" were released after McCartney's announced departure from and subsequent break-up of the group. (The image above is from the cover of the album Woman released by Peter Michael McCartney, also known as Mike McGear, Paul's brother and only sibling. He is a musician and photographer, a well-known artist in his own right.)

In 1987, the song was recorded by charity supergroup Ferry Aid (which included McCartney). It reached #1 on the UK Singles Chart for 3 weeks and reached the Top 10 in many other European countries.

McCartney said he had the idea of "Let It Be" after he had a dream about his mother during the tense period surrounding the sessions for The Beatles ("The White Album") in 1968. According to McCartney, the song's reference to "Mother Mary" was not a biblical reference. It just happens that Paul's Mother Mary was a Roman Catholic. (His father belonged to the Church of England, and later turned agnostic.) Mary had married Jim on the promise that any children would be baptized in the Catholic faith. The children, Paul and Michael, were not enrolled in Catholic schools, as their father believed that they learned too much towards religion instead of education. Paul remembers his mother encouraging them to use the Queen's English instead of the Liverpool dialect, unusual in the area they lived in.

Paul's parents were Jim McCartney and Mary Patricia Mohan. Like many families in Liverpool, they were of Irish descent. Paul's Mother Mary was a trained nurse and midwife. The McCartney family lived in council houses during Mary's life of 47 years, but Paul later bought his father a house called Rembrandt, in Heswall, Cheshire. 2 years after Mary was born, her father met and married his second wife, Rose, who had 2 children from a previous marriage. Mary, who had been looking after the Mohans, realized that Rose did not care much for domesticity or her new husband's children, so she chose to live with her aunts. In 1923, at 14 years of age, Mary started work as a nurse trainee at the Smithdown Road Hospital, and then took a 3-year training course at Walton Road Hospital in Rice Lane, Liverpool, eventually becoming a state registered nurse.

Mary became a health visitor and midwife, and was on-call day or night, riding a bicycle to houses where she was needed as a midwife. Her eldest son Paul said his first memory was watching her cycling away when it was snowing heavily. The family could not afford a TV set until the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953; they never owned a car.

Jim and Mary would often take Paul and Michael for a walk to the local rustic village of Hale. According to Paul, these frequent trips out of Liverpool to the countryside inspired his love of nature. The McCartneys had a full set of George Newnes encyclopedias, which Jim encouraged his two sons to use, and told them to look up any word they did not understand. It was hoped that Paul would become a doctor or a teacher.

Jim had a collection of old 78 rpm records that he would often play, or perform his musical "party pieces"– the hits of the time – on the piano. He used to point out the different instruments in songs on the radio to his sons, and took them to local brass band concerts. He also taught them a basic idea of harmony between instruments, and Paul credits that as helpful when later singing harmonies with John Lennon. After Mary's death, Jim bought Paul a nickel-plated trumpet as a birthday present; when skiffle music became popular, Paul swapped the trumpet for a £15 Framus Zenith (model 17) acoustic guitar. Paul also played his father's Framus Spanish guitar when writing early songs with John. With encouragement from his father, Paul started playing the family piano and then wrote "When I'm Sixty-Four" (his father was 64). Jim advised his son to take some music lessons, which he did, but soon realized that he preferred to earn by ear, as did his father.

How the song Let It Be was written, Songfacts says (songfacts.com):

McCartney had a dream one night when he was paranoid and anxious. He saw his mom who had been dead for ten years or so; she came to him in his time of trouble, speaking words of wisdom. This brought him much peace when he needed it. It was this sweet dream that got him to begin writing the song.

John Lennon hated this song because of its apparent Christian overtones. He made the comment before recording it, (in a falsetto voice), "And now we'd like to do 'Hark The Angels Come.'" Lennon saw to it that "Maggie Mae," a song about a Liverpool prostitute, followed it on the album.

In 2010, Rolling Stone magazine placed Let It Be at #8 on the Beatles' 100 Greatest Songs. Mojo magazine placed it at #50 in 2006. AllMusic said it was one of "the Beatles' most popular and finest ballads" but Ian MacDonald disagreed, saying the song "achieved a popularity well out of proportion to its artistic weight" and that it was "'Hey Jude' without the musical and emotional release." In a Playboy interview in 1980, John Lennon disavowed any involvement in composing the song; he said:

That's Paul. What can you say? Nothing to do with the Beatles. It could've been Wings. I don't know what he's thinking when he writes "Let It Be."

Let It Be

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Let it be, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

And when the broken-hearted people
Living in the world agree
There will be an answer, let it be
For though they may be parted
There is still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be

Let it be, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Yeah, there will be an answer, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

Let it be, let it be
Ah, let it be, yeah, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

And when the night is cloudy
There is still a light that shines on me
Shine on until tomorrow, let it be
I wake up to the sound of music,
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Let it be, let it be
Let it be, yeah, let it be
Oh, there will be an answer, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Let it be, yeah, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

By Paul McCartney

1970: The song gave the Beatles their 7th consecutive year charting a #1 hit, sharing the all-time record at that time with Elvis Presley.

1971: John Denver recorded a solo acoustic cover of Let It Be on his album Poems, Prayers, and Promises. Gladys Knight and the Pips released a version of the song on the tribute album Motown Sings The Beatles. Joan Baez included Let It Be in her album Blessed Are...

1977: Ray Charles did a cover version of his album True To Life.

1985: The song is performed regularly during McCartney's performances. On 13 July 1985, Paul did Let It Be as one of the closing acts of the Live Aid charity concert in front of an estimated global TV audience exceeding one billion people. It was beset by technical difficulties when his microphone failed for the first 2 minutes of his piano performance, making it difficult for TV viewers and impossible for those in the stadium to hear him. As a result, previous performers David Bowie, Bob Geldof, Alison Moyet and Pete Townshend returned to the stage to back him up. He later joked about changing the lyrics to "There will be some feedback, let it be."

1995: A second instrumental rendition is from saxophonist Nelson Rangell from a compilation album (I Got No Kick Against) Modern Jazz – Celebration of the Songs of the Beatles.

1998: Along with a 700-strong congregation, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr sang Let It Be during a memorial service for Linda McCartney at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square.

2001: Paul led a crowd-rousing rendition of the song as part of the finale of the Concert for New York City, a benefit concert he organized featuring many famous musicians held 20 October 2001 at the Madison Square Garden in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks.

2002: Lesley Garrett sang an operatic version on her 2002 album The Singer.

2003: McCartney performed the song as a private rendition for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.

2008: On 18 July 2008, Paul performed Let It Be with Billy Joel and his band to close the final concert at the Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, before its demolition.

2007: A gospel version is sung by Carol Woods & Timothy T Michum, featured in the film Across The Universe.

2012: On 04 June 2012, Paul performed the song as part of his set in the Concert for the Queen that celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.

2013: The cast of the show Glee covered the song in the 2nd episode of the 5th season, "Tina in the Sky with Diamonds."

2015: On 14 May 2015, Soutik Biswas says The Beatles went to India in February 1968 (bbc.com); the image here is from the ashram. A Times of India reporter asked John Lennon what The Beatles' ambition was, and he said, "We don't have any ambitions. We are not a missionary group."

Let It Be, the final original album released by The Beatles, is most memorable. Says Mike McPadden (08 June 2015, vh1.com):

The LP's toweringly brilliant music becomes even more powerful upon considering that it arose from the insanely intense bad feelings that did, in fact, break up The Beatles. That palpable strife uncomfortably dominates the film Let It Be, an unflinching documentary on the making of the album. All these years later though, the music, of course, is what matters.

Let it be, let it be!

Unlike any other blog posts I have written, this one comes mostly from Wikipedia.

I held his right arm and pressed many times and said, "Santi, this is Uncle Frank." And his immediate answer was, "How did you know?" And I immediately thought he must be all right because his mind is lucid and he speaks as if this is not a medical emergency!

How did I know about his medical condition when I lived with my family 200 km away from Asingan, my hometown? A relative, Roger texted me, having been told by his neighbor, my brother Emilio about Santi being brought to the hospital in serious condition. Roger knows I am close to Santi. Roger said they visited that morning and he was in serious condition. Emilio visited Santi the day before we did and he said yesterday when we visited, with Trisha, Santi's daughter, that he looked certainly better than the other day. I took photographs of the monitor on the wall that was showing graphs (here posterized along with Mother Mary of Paul McCartney and brother Michael McCartney, who took the Mary's picture).

That's your clue to my juxtaposed posterized images of modern science and modern service. The Nazareth Hospital monitor at this ICU serves the patient's purposes with a continuous display of vital signs; Mother Mary of Nazareth served her family and specifically her only son, giving birth to him and being behind him through thick and thin, mostly thin. "He suffered under Pontius Pilate" can also be written as "She suffered under Pontius Pilate." Her son died while she was looking but, on the third day, he rose again from the dead.

When we visited Santi, we persuaded my brother Emilio to talk to Santi about "in case"– my brother, now almost 80, used to work in a hospital in Toronto, Canada and he certainly knows about dying (his own wife Manang Maring Daranciang, cousin of Roger, died a slow death from lung cancer); he also knows about money (he has some, pension from Canada), specifically for Santi to instruct his bank to transfer his time deposit to Emilio's name so that in case of death, heaven forbid, those whom he would leave behind could make good use of what he has saved all these years for his loved ones. I did not go with Emilio. I wasn't looking at the time but I think it took about 30 minutes and, in the end, Emilio could not persuade our nephew Dr Santi to do what was needed to be done, or so he was told. Santi insisted, "Saanak pay nga matay. Mabiagak pay." (I will not die. I will live.)

Now I must tell you the irony of all this. Dr Santi is an atheist; he does not believe in an Almighty Being, in God, while my brother and I do, Roman Catholics as we are. In my own hours of darkness many years ago, years of darkness in fact, I went from a believer to an agnostic, but never an atheist. What's an agnostic? I was telling myself then, "If there is a God, I'm doing good anyway, so I should be all right when I die. If there is no God, I should have no problem. I will continue to do good anyway." It was the community of believers called the Bukás Lóob sa Díyos who saved my sanity, not to mention my marriage and my family.

I can see Lina, Dr Santi's sweetheart and the mother of dear Trisha, 13 years old, not quite worried at all. She is quite hopeful Dr Santi will survive this. She keeps saying, "Mamatiak met ng agbiag pay." (I believe that he will live.) Dr Santi is not going to die.

"Dr Santi is not going to die" is a statement of belief. That is not mine. I do not believe; I just hope. I heard something about a surgery. I was going to convince him out of the world of surgery and into the world of nutrition. I just read about the case of novelist Pat Conroy who had type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, a failing liver, and found himself lying on a hospital bed (Nora Krug, 17 August 2015, washingtonpost.com). A strict diet saved him. Dr Santi knows all about antioxidants.

When I heard Emilio's "report," I told myself that I was going to talk to Dr Santi about money, but in a different way. I was going to tell him about letting go. (If you believe in God, that would be "Letting go and letting God," but we have a different case here.) I was going to tell Dr Santi that his "I will not die" is his firm belief, that it is his way of telling his body to fight the diseases and win. I was thinking of asking him to sign a Living Will, of which I learned from another doctor, my friend Dr Antonio C Oposa, surgeon & human being extraordinaire, which he can change at will (no pun intended). Dr Santi was going to transfer his time deposit to the account of someone he trusts, and that would be all. We are expecting the best but we are getting ready for the worst. But when I googled for "Living Will," I found that it is only designed as a medical directive to forego any "heroic efforts" at resuscitation, and has nothing to do with any bank account, so I changed my mind and instead decided on "Let It Be" as the simple and elegant device of persuading the unpersuaded.

According to the doctors at Nazareth, Dr Santi's medical condition is "complicated" (my word). Interesting, when you think of Nazareth. The Nazareth Hospital in Dagupan City is right beside the river wide enough to enjoy a cruise and preach to the people in the boat if you wanted to. I would if I could. Dr Santi was too sick to know and object that they were bringing him to Nazareth and not some other hospital – they brought him first to the Sacred Heart Hospital in Urdaneta City, 12 km from Asingan, but they had no room for him in the ICU! So Sacred Heart called the other hospitals and learned that Nazareth had exactly one ICU vacant. God loves you, sinner or saint. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the loving heart of Jesus is "the representation of his divine love for humanity" (Wikipedia); it is "the Heart that has so loved men" (Catholic Encyclopedia, newadvent.org), both believers and unbelievers.

It was in Nazareth in Israel where when Mother Mary told Joseph that she was with child and he knew it was not his own, so the man wanted to reject the woman as his bride. Joseph was simply being logical; the intercourse that they have had was only verbal, not sexual. The child must be someone else's who does not want to own up his act. The nerve of Mary! You are being logical when you insist, as does Dr Santi, that God does not exist. A believer cannot prove that God exists.

In the past, my favorite nephew and I have had exchanges of email about the existence of God. He wanted to debate the issue; he wanted to persuade me that there is no God. This believer did not want to debate with an unbeliever because he has all the answers, and will not acknowledge any logical fallacy. Finally, I said if he really wanted to debate with me on the existence of God, I would open a yahoogroup and we would debate in the open. He would not consent. That was good, because I really did not want to debate with anyone, and I knew that he would lose – I know all the logical fallacies he would use. (If you don't believe me, ask for a free copy of my ebook on logical fallacies as well as how they apply to reproductive health, The Emperors' New Clothes (213 pages, version 7, July 2014, frankahilario@gmail.com.)

Continuing on the logical fallacy: I said to him once in his clinic at Urdaneta City that for him to say there is no God is his belief, and I do not contest that. For me to say that there is a God is my belief, and he cannot contest that. You cannot argue against a belief, precisely because it is a belief; it cannot be proven or disproven. It is a logical fallacy to say that God does not exist because you cannot prove it. End of argument.

So, yesterday, I wrote and uploaded to my blog the essay "Let It Be – The Beatles," and I printed a copy (4 pages) to give to Dr Santi for him to read. You should read it yourself, but if you haven't at this point, let me tell you that that 2,300-word essay is meant to be a gentle persuasion towards "Letting go and letting God." Dr Santi does not believe in God, so none of those 2,300 words says or hints anything about faith, religion, spirituality, or God. But I was sure he was going to read it because he is a diehard fan of The Beatles; in fact, he has a complete collection of their songs. When I was teaching in Asingan High School, Dr Santi had with his friends a band and he was singing and playing the guitar, The Beatles and all.

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Let it be, let it be
Let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be!

Now I want to tell you that Paul & Mike McCartney's Mother Mary to me looks exactly like the Roman Catholic Mother Mary to me (here is the original image, taken by her own son Mike, printed on the cover of his own album titled Woman– she was a nurse working in a hospital). Do you see how all of this is turning out?

But I'm not finished telling you what I was going to tell Dr Santi. I was going to tell him that when he tells himself, "I will not die. I will live," he is commanding his body to fight the diseases. Plural, because the doctors say he has a damaged heart, his lungs and kidneys are impaired, and he has high blood pressure. I was going to tell him that by commanding his body, he is adding to the stress that his body already is confronting. I was going to tell him, because I too believe in the miraculous ability of the human body to defend itself against internal aggression, "Don't force yourself. Don't try too hard. Your body can take care of itself. Why not let go? When you let go, your body will relax and you reduce the burden that your body has to endure, and you will have higher chances of getting out of this mess." Or words to that effect.

When I visit again today, Tuesday, 18 August 2015, I am not going to tell him, "Let go and let God." I am going to print this again after uploading, but I will give the copy to him only when I'm ready to leave Nazareth in the afternoon.

"Let It Be."

I wanted Dr Santi to think twice about Mother Mary, literally and figuratively. Despite what the author Paul McCartney says about what or who inspired him to compose "Let It Be," I have always believed that the very title and in fact the whole song itself is about the intercession of the Roman Catholic Mother Mary. John Lennon was said to hate – and I love – the song precisely because of its Christian undertones. And it's not just me; Jeffrey McLeod of Catholic Stand says, "Yes, the song is about the Virgin Mary"! (30 July 2013, catholicstand.com). Paul has said his inspiration was his Mother Mary, and that may be true, but you must remember that Paul and brother Mike's father Jim and Mother Mary were Catholics, and both boys were baptized Catholics. And, Jeffrey argues that not because the author says so that it is so. The author may be lying.

What did Mother Mary say to the angel who announced to her that she was going to bear a child and it was of the Holy Spirit? "Let it be done to me according to your word." The phrase "Let it be" is Mother Mary's phrase and nobody else. Paul McCartney wrote the words but he was thinking Mother Mary of the Child Jesus. Says Jeffrey:

Did Paul himself know what the song Let it Be was about when he wrote it? My answer is that, like you and I, he might not have been fully aware of the universal truth he was communicating. You have to help him answer that question. You participate in his spiritual milieu. Paul was raised Catholic, so you know full well that he knew the Blessed Mother would have said “Let it Be” – (or in Latin fiat). Whether he remains Catholic I don’t know. But he would certainly agree that if his song is about consolation, light, and solace, this would be a faithful portrait of the mercy of our Blessed Mother.

So, "Let It Be." Mother Mary, come to me!