Pet Melliza

Atty Dwight Trasadas : The city government under Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog is burying us in debts for overspending. By hiring 7,000 casuals, the city bleeds at least P54 million monthly for their salaries which is half a billion plus a year. The amount could have been invested in social services.   Iloilo City Rep. Jerry Trenas, a "political plagiarist'? That's what former congressman and justice secretary Raul Gonzalez Sr. (2nd from right) calls him. When gonzalez's son and namesake, Raul Jr. (2nd from left, with microphone) , sat as member of the Lower House, he authored a bill converting the West Visayas College of Science and Technology into a state univirsity. When Trenas became member of the Lower House, he trashed Gonzalez's proposed measure but authored an identical bill which basically brought no substantial difference from that of Gonzalez. If Sen. Tito Sotto III plagiarized in his privileged speeches, Trenas committed a similar offense, polit...

By Pet Melliza/ The Beekeeper In Scholasticism, the world is already complete in both material and spiritual realms. Morality is well defined with all principles neatly laid down by Divine Wisdom, and these set of precepts are transmitted to the hierarchs of religion who, in turn, are mandated to hand them down to the faithful and enforce them. There is nothing left for the conscience to discern.  Wala ka nang hahanapin pa. The inventory of sinful acts -  mortal and venial -  is already provided by Absolute Being (AB). Man or rational animal has a soul destined to heaven if in the lifetime he/she has committed no mortal sin. The soul saddled by mortal sin has to go elsewhere. In ethics or morality, the human mind needs not belabor itself to know that violating the Divine Law is immoral, thus, mortal sin.  The RH Bill is immoral for that and also mortal sin. That brand of epistemology flies in the face of history. If the reader may notice, I...

  BY PET MELLIZA/THE BEEKEEPER People who oppose the RH Bill see it as “immoral”; it promotes promiscuity, among others. Their latest argument is enunciated by Bishop Socrates Villegas, the bill means “corruption.” Feminists like Gabriela, on the other hand, favor it as step to assert women’s struggle for gender equality, to control their bodies and gain access to public health care and information to be empowered to make informed decisions, and in so doing, reduce maternal death and, for those who survived, the permanent physical injuries that follow. Often, the RH Bill from the feminist perspective is muddled as strategy for development, as way out of poverty, which misses the social structure breeding injustice and mass ignorance. Allow me to retreat to memory lane back to philosophy studies in college on how this brand of morality or sense of right and wrong, as I learned, evolved. Among the first philosophy pounded on my tender head was Scholast...

From L-R: This writer, Altamira, Romero and host Peter Jimenea. Today's guests in Kape kag Isyu talk show: Gil Altamera (second from left), commercial operations manager of Panay Energy Development Corporation (PEDC), and Rodulfo Romero (second from right), finance executive officer of the same company that owns the coal-fired plant in Iloilo City. PEDC is currently jarred by an uproar from consumers after the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) granted its petition to collect "under re coveries" at P0.32 per kilowatt-hour for one year. The under recovery, says Altamira, does not represent losses but the that was uncollected because the ERC denied the amount that PEDC applied for during its commissioning stage. "We are only trying to collect what we were not allowed to because what was allowed us was way too low," explains Altamira. The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) has petitioned the ERC to acquire part of the switch-...