WTF of the Week: and it's only Monday.

In the latest concept to come out of the Bureau of Internal Revenue's long and outstanding tradition of operational excellence and cutting-edge efficiency, the agency has announced a plan to dispatch monitors to hotels throughout the country to take note of the amount of customer traffic over the upcoming Valentine's Day week.

The rationale behind this, according to BIR head Joel Tan-Torres, is that hotels tend to under-report their income over holidays such as Valentine's Day, when they do a greater business due to the increased number of "people who want to spend some private time together," as he delicately put it.

“Our people will be discrete. They will be inconspicuous, merely noting the goings-on of cars and people [who] go to these places on February 14,” Tan-Torres said.

Not only is that idea a complete fucking buzzkill for anyone who was considering stepping out and having a little "private time" with their sweetheart -- Gee, Mr. Tan-Torres, you mean you're actually surprised that people would be a little uncomfortable with having their "goings-on" "noted" by "inconspicuous" government agents? -- but, given the BIR's demonstrated inability to so much as use a stapler without incurring a self-inflicted injury, probably will not result in much progress towards the objective of complete and accurate tax collection.

I feel bad for the business owners, because they're the ones who will be harmed by this completely retarded idea. I myself had a mind to treat the wife to a quick, Lola-watch-the-kids-we'll-be-back-Sunday weekend of unhealthy food, over-priced drinks, and dirty freakiness on sheets someone else would have to wash, but that for sure ain't happenin' now that I know there'll be a Gestapo toby hiding in the bushes "noting" our "goings-on". Which means that not only will a hotel lose out, but so will a restaurant, a bar or two, and a couple cab drivers. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who is reacting this way to this particular bit of news. Nice going, BIR.   

Super Bowl Weekend Special: ALL HAIL LAMBERT

This is Super Bowl Weekend, the biggest game of the year in the greatest sport ever invented, and since I’m in the rare and much-appreciated position of not having anything I need to do right now (at least for today), I’d like to take time out from more weighty subject matter to celebrate the occasion.

Unfortunately, this year’s Super Bowl will be played by the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints, two teams whom I regard with extreme ambivalence. I’m sure they both have fans that are just totally pumped about the whole thing, and good for them, but for me it will suffice to catch the recap on SportsCenter. But I like talking about football, so I’ll amuse myself, and maybe even you, by doing so.

Most football players these days are pale shadows of the great ones of my youth, thanks in no small part to the progressive pussifying of the rules over the past twenty years or so. The NFL just doesn’t have the roster of iron-fisted, face-smashing soul-wreckers that it used to, guys like Deacon Jones, or Larry Csonka, or just about anyone who suited up for John Madden’s Oakland Raiders. Or this guy, who was the best one of them all:

John Harold “Jack” Lambert, Jr., the greatest linebacker in the history of the universe.
 

ALL HAIL LAMBERT

 

Now before some douchebag gets on here and tells me Dick Butkus was better, just save yourself the trouble and STFU now. Sure, Butkus was pretty good. But Butkus didn’t put up a record like this:

 

* 9-time Pro Bowl selection (1975 through 1983)

* 4× Super Bowl champion (IX, X, XIII, XIV)

* NFL 75th Anniversary All-Time Team

* NFL 1980s All-Decade Team
* NFL 1970s All-Decade Team
* 1974 NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year
* 1976 NFL Defensive Player of the Year

And I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing about Butkus ripping the face mask off his own helmet out of sheer annoyance, as I saw Lambert do once. So there’s that, too.
 
The 1976 season started off badly for the two-time defending champion Steelers. Bradshaw went down with an injury, Swann missed a couple of games, and Mean Joe Greene, the leader of the vaunted Steel Curtain defense, was sidelined with a back injury. Lambert (who was, it should be remembered, only in his third season) took over as defensive captain, and in a team meeting after the Steelers’ fourth loss in five games declared that they should win all the nine remaining games, and that he would personally beat the shit out of anyone on the team who did not put forth the maximum effort to do so. So what happened?
 
*Pittsburgh 23, Cincinnati 6
*Pittsburgh 27, New York Giants 0
*Pittsburgh 23, San Diego 0
*Pittsburgh 45, Kansas City 0
*Pittsburgh 14, Miami 3
*Pittsburgh 32, Houston 16
*Pittsburgh 7, Cincinnati 3
*Pittsburgh 42, Tampa Bay 0
*Pittsburgh 21, Houston 0

HOLY SHIT. Even now, more than three decades after having seen it happen, I am still dumbfounded by it. Eight of Pittsburgh’s 11 defensive starters went to the Pro Bowl that year, and the team on the whole broke almost every statistical record, threw it on the ground, stomped on it, and then pissed on the remains. Pittsburgh won a Pyrrhic victory over Baltimore in the first playoff game, 40-14, losing both Franco Harris and Rocky Bleier (who had both rushed for over 1,000 yards during the season) to injuries. With their offense essentially crippled, the Steelers lost the AFC Championship to Oakland and missed the chance at a third consecutive Super Bowl title. Even so, most Steelers fans and even the owners of the team consider the 1976 squad the best Steelers team in history, even better than the line-ups that won Pittsburgh’s six championships. And at the center of it all was my personal hero, Jack Lambert, the “Vampire in Cleats” (a nickname earned in the era before everyone thought vampires should be faggy emos, due to his temperament on the field and obvious dental flaws).
 

ALL HAIL LAMBERT

 

Here’s Jack trying to manually decapitate one of the Baltimore Colt’s running backs:

 

 

And here’s a good video of Jack kicking some more asses, and most likely also taking names:

 

 

BE LIKE LAMBERT

 

Why is Jack Lambert my personal hero and role model? What made Jack great at what he did was that he thought his way to awesomeness more than anything else. No other linebacker was as good at reading offensive sets and directing a defense as he was. The video, being a personal highlight reel, is actually a little misleading; Jack did make a lot of individual plays like those throughout his career, but whenever that happened it was because somebody else missed a cue or the offense did something exceptional to overcome the defensive set. Most of the time, the action resembled that picture of the Baltimore running back (I don’t remember who that is, as if it mattered) being epically failed by committee.

 

The way Jack Lambert played football is the way anyone should try to do anything in life. Learn as much as you can about the task at hand, and keep studying, every day. Recognize the talents of the people around you, and direct them to work together in a complementary way for maximum results. Direct, then lead by example by being a 100% balls-out beserker on every play. Whatever strength and energy you’ve got, use it all, and if you’re not the biggest, strongest, or fastest guy on the field (he wasn’t – Jack was only about my size, 6’3” and 220 pounds or so, only had average speed, and would play so hard that he’d be totally gassed by the fourth quarter, although by then it usually didn’t matter), then be intimidating – don’t just stop your opponent, beat him down and make him question why he ever thought taking you on would be a good idea. Don’t cheat and don’t play dirty; Jack wasn’t a cheap-shot artist, and as a person he’s sort of a low-key guy...

 

...well, sort of... but he had no problem applying a little extra humiliation when it was warranted, especially if some smartass was running his mouth, or dissed one of Jack’s teammates. That shit would not abide.

 

And when the job’s done, find another job to do and don’t define your future life by past achievements. After he retired at the end of 1984 season Jack virtually dropped out of sight, and even today rarely gives interviews or spends time commemorating his days as the Most Awesome of the Steelers’ Pantheon. He’s not unapproachable by any means – he’s a friendly gruff, and gracious to the occasional fan that crosses his path – but to his way of thinking he’s just a guy that used to play football, and now does something else. Which in his case is tending to his little farm in rural Pennsylvania, and coaching kids’ baseball and basketball teams. For a while he was a part-time Wildlife Officer for the Pennsylvania DNR; I don’t know if he still does that. Safe to say that while he was on duty, the incidents of poaching and other misbehavior in Pennsylvania’s forests and game lands probably dropped considerably – this is not the guy you want catching you fishing or hunting without a license.

 

Jack Lambert: Awesome at football and awesome at life. If ever you’re confused as to what to do, just do what Jack would do – it’ll probably work out pretty well.

I'll Decide When I Want To...And Now's as Good a Time as Any

Now that the Senate has adjourned its session until the end of May four presidential candidates and two vice-presidential candidates are free to pursue their campaigns full-time, which means the silly season is about to begin. As always, when I am asked for my opinion I am careful to stress that people should weigh the evidence and make up their own minds, but lately I’ve getting a lot more of the response “Okay, sure, but who would you pick?”

I’ve already said a few times that I think Noynoy Aquino – until now the front-runner, according to the surveys – would be a good choice because he is such an utter idiot that the country would run straight onto the rocks at flank speed with him at the helm, and that might wake people up enough to finally start using their goddamned heads to choose and hold their leaders accountable. Since, however, Ignoy seems to have tripped and fallen over the rail before he even gets to the wheelhouse, I think I have to revise my earlier (and admittedly pretty cynical) point of view. Since the essential information about all the candidates is already known, I’ve once again – and most likely, for the last time, since I have other things I’d rather be doing – suspended my preconceived notions and applied a sensible assessment method to choose a candidate. That will not, of course, be the basis of a vote in my case, but rather the basis of a logically-supportable opinion. Which, the people in my sphere of influence being who they are, will probably end up being the basis for about 20 votes no matter how strenuously I insist they think for themselves.

The method has some similarities to the Kepner-Tregnoe Matrix explained by BongV, but is more properly a form of forced rankings. Rather than being graded against an objective standard, the nine candidates (selected because they are the ones who appear on the surveys) are compared to each other in five categories:

Personal CV: The education and work experience of the candidate outside of government. A resumé outside of politics is an important source of perspective for a political leader.

Record in Government: Actual elected or appointed positions held, and what the candidate has achieved in them.

Running Mate: The Philippine system of electing a Vice President separately from a President is actually not very smart. Since the primary purpose of the Vice President is to replace the President should the latter no longer be able to serve, it is better that they be elected together. This would ensure some consistency and stability in the government, and a continuation, for the most part, of the policies established by the President.

Even though it is understood that a candidate’s choice of running mate may not be elected along with him, the choice can still be judged because it presumably represents the candidate’s assessment of who would best assist him in managing the Executive branch, and replace him if necessary. Obviously, not all candidates choose a running mate on that basis but instead regard the selection as a matter of election strategy, but it is a position that has a real purpose and real implications, and should be considered on that basis.

Platform: Does the candidate have one, and if so, how well does it meet the standards for a proper platform? For this particular rating, the details of the platform are not important, but whether or not the platform actually has them.

Policy: The details are important here – to what extent do the candidate’s positions agree with my point of view?

The candidate judged the best in each category is given a score of 9, with the second-best scoring an 8, 7 for third, and so on down to 1 for the last candidate on the list. The scores for each candidate are then added to give a final score, with 45 (9 x 5 categories) being the maximum possible score.

It is important to keep in mind that all these are subjective judgments; anyone else might interpret the same information about the candidates in a different way, and make a different choice. The only valid arguments, then, are those about the correctness of the interpretations – not about flighty, irrelevant concepts such as “winnability”, or “being for/against the current president.” Likewise, personality and “image” are entirely irrelevant, as are personal relationships that cannot be clearly quantified in terms of an effect on a candidate’s performance in office. That means that Noynoy Aquino’s parents or his supposedly upright character are not part of the equation, nor is Gibo Teodoro’s relationship with Danding Cojuangco, just to give a couple examples.

The Results:

Personal CV: I have to give a slight edge to Nick Perlas over Dick Gordon here, though both men have impressive work records – Gordon with the Red Cross in particular, and Perlas with his extensive NGO and environmental work. The big loser in this category is Noynoy Aquino, whose resumé lists only short-term, sinecure positions; his work output as a legislator and the content of his public statements indicate that he has little, if any, understanding of basic work ethic or business principles.

Record in Government: Gordon sets the standard; his record in Olongapo and Subic speaks for itself, and he has been an active and thoughtful Senator. Eddie Villanueva trails the pack, and really only gets a point in this category because of the structure of the assessment method – if it were possible, I’d give him a 0 or even negative points.

Running Mate: Again, Gordon wins. Fernando Bayani is an intelligent, experienced administrator in his own right, who has made clearly tangible improvements in Marikina and across Metro Manila. Jamby Madrigal and Nick Perlas do not even have running mates, which is unacceptable. In this case, I put Perlas just ahead of Madrigal at the bottom of the list simply on the basis of his having a more well-developed advocacy and platform.

As a side note, Gibo Teodoro – who otherwise scores fairly well throughout – managed to scuttle any chance at being a leading contender with his retarded choice of Edu Manzano for vice-president.

Platform: Nick Perlas and JC de los Reyes both have exemplary platforms, and the only reason for putting Perlas ahead in this category is that he developed his platform a little earlier than Ang Kapatiran. Still, consider it a virtual tie. Dick Gordon tries to make up for not having one by extensive references to his record; fortunately for him he has a record worth referencing, but no platform is no platform, and he only scores a 4 in this category. Joseph Estrada has a vague set of statements on his party’s website that one might imagine are supposed to pass for a platform, but if so, they fail miserably.

Policy: Gibo Teodoro and Dick Gordon both have a general outlook that is sensible and demands greater self-reliance and accountability on the part of the people, and they address issues in roughly the same priority that I would. In Gordon’s case, however, what he says is clearly illustrated by what he already has achieved, whereas Teodoro is simply offering potential. Between the two, there is greater confidence that with Gordon the people will be getting exactly what he says they will, and so he gets the nod in this category.

Eddie Villanueva, representing one of the most evil and divisive forces in the modern world – commercial Christianity – would once again get minus points if the format allowed. He shares the bottom with Noynoy Aquino, whose stated policies – such as they are – are regressive and support the entrenched oligarchy, where they are not actually completely illogical or clearly dishonest pandering.

Final Scores:

Eddie Villanueva – 13: A nuisance candidate who should not even be allowed to run for any elected office, let alone the presidency. The last thing this country needs is Elmer Gantry running things.

Joseph Estrada – 16: Erap seems to be unclear on the distinction between “pardoned” and “exonerated”. The man is a criminal, and were it not for someone else’s ill-advised concept of political expediency would be rotting his hoodlum ass away in prison, where he belongs.

Jamby Madrigal – 17: Basing a campaign on running against someone who is no longer competing for the office is actually kind of stupid. It is, however, a perfect expression of her entire Senate career in which she has been an obstructionist whiner par excellence. Noynoy likes to call himself a “fiscalizer”, but Jamby actually does it – which is about the same thing as being good at pushing people off the LRT platform into the path of the approaching train.

Noynoy Aquino – 22: The best thing about the Aquino campaign is the slim possibility that he could get run over by a truck or struck by lightning, leaving Mar Roxas to take up the banner for the Liberal Party.

JC de los Reyes – 26: His party’s platform is well-developed and contains a lot of ideas that appeal to me. I am skeptical of his religious grounding, but on the other hand, he and the party do seem to understand the proper separation of Church and State, and he is not nearly as intolerable – or intolerant – a religious personality as Villanueva, or the Catholic Church’s political machine. Even so, he simply does not have enough experience at this point to be President – the leap from City Councillor to Malacañang misses too many important steps.

If these scores were grades, anything below a 27 would be an ‘F’. Here are the ones who passed:

Nick Perlas – 29: Great platform, excellent personal experience, and fairly good overall policy positions. But his having avoided the dirty business of government and neglecting to select a running mate are deal-breakers.

Manny Villar – 31: I’m surprised that he scores as well as he does, because if I was doing this just based on personal impressions, I would write him off as a contemptible pig. A good example of why a rational, information-based process is better. Even so, I’m kind of glad he only finishes third on this list.

Gibo Teodoro – 32: A firm second choice in almost every respect, but really calls down suspicion on his ability to select an effective team with his choice of that yahoo Manzano.

Dick Gordon – 39: A clear winner, even without a proper platform (which I would still like to see, by the way – let’s do the whole job right, Dick, please). He has the qualifications, the experience, and the record of achievement to back them up. He’s already started to build a strong team by joining up with Bayani, and he has sensible ideas for what to do with this mess of a country once elected. If there’s any hope of progress for the Philippines to come out of the 2010 elections, it lies with Dick Gordon.

So that’s it: GORDON FOR PRESIDENT IN 2010. My people can now consider their instructions given.

Haiti's Grim Reminder

It has been two weeks since the tragic earthquake in Haiti, and in this part of the world the news has gone below the fold. Now that the Filipinos caught up in the disaster have all been accounted for one way or another – most of them safe, but a few unfortunately not – the country has turned its attention back to more routine and pedestrian concerns. In a country even more disaster-prone than a hapless place like Haiti, it’s hard to get too worked up about somebody else’s catastrophe.

That is not entirely a bad thing; calamity and mayhem are often so sensationalized by the media that a little restraint is actually refreshing. But on the other hand, I have to wonder if the local media actually should have made more of the Haiti disaster than they actually did. There are a number of disturbing parallels between what happened in Haiti and what might – in all likelihood, probably will – happen here sooner or later, but no one seems to have gotten the hint or really wants to talk about it.

In the past 400 years Metro Manila has been affected by 23 damaging earthquakes, with 13 of those causing significant destruction. It is impossible to determine any sort of predictive pattern from these historic quakes, because they occurred at odd intervals – from as short as two years apart to as long as 94 – and their epicentres were located on different faults at widely varying distances from the city. One of the earliest on record, the 1645 quake, actually occurred 120 kilometres away in Nueva Ecija and was strong enough to wreck most of Intramuros. In 1863, similar damage was caused by an earthquake under Manila Bay about five kilometres offshore.

Concerned parties at the national and local levels are not unaware or dismissive of the risks. In 2000, scientists from PHIVOLCS and the USGS published a study on the Marikina Valley Fault System, a branch of which traverses the eastern side of the metropolis and which is considered to pose a major earthquake threat. Largely on the basis of this report, the Metro Manila Earthquake Impact Reduction Study (MMEIRS) was produced in 2004 and predicted a grim butcher’s bill of the probable effects of a magnitude-7.8 earthquake on the city:

• 17% of all buildings destroyed or heavily damaged
• 32.5% at least partially damaged
• 49,000 buildings destroyed by fire
• Up to 16,000 dead or injured

While the MMEIRS did encourage some action – the city of Makati, in particular, developed an aggressive mitigation and response plan – in other respects it provoked pointless quibbling among government and business leaders. Some suspected ulterior motives on the part of insurers in the timing and publication of the study; others questioned the ambiguity of the scientific data behind identifying the Marikina Valley Fault as the likely culprit of the next big quake. Officials in Marikina, alarmed by the potential PR damage, actually prevailed upon PHIVOLCS to formally drop the ‘Marikina’ from the fault system’s name (the two branches of the fault are now referred to as the West and East Valley Faults). Consequently, the MMEIRS achieved little more than temporarily bringing attention to the seismic threat; it did result in some upgrades and modifications to response plans and a dozen or so of the capital’s important buildings have undergone some seismic retrofitting, but certainly nothing on a scale to address a metro-wide disaster has been accomplished. If there is any doubt of that, the slow, ham-fisted response to the recent Ondoy floods – a comparatively minor event – should serve as an appropriately distressing example.

In all fairness, “earthquake preparation” is in some respects an abstraction because of the unpredictability of the event. PHIVOLC’s best guess is that earthquakes occurred on the Valley fault system in 1658 and 1771, and geological evidence uncovered during the research from which the 2000 report was developed could only pin down an earthquake frequency of somewhere between 200 and 400 years. And as has already been noted, all of the worst earthquakes in Manila’s history have come from random directions, sometimes a considerable distance from the city. For government leaders with terms measured in years conceptualising, and more to the point, allocating budget to pay to prepare for an event with a recurrence measured in decades or centuries is a tough sell. And mitigation in the form of proper construction design and retrofitting of older structures only goes so far; in the case of the much more frequent, smaller earthquakes it makes sense, but in the inevitable monster quake there might not be any such thing as “earthquake-proof.” Consider the case of Kobe, Japan, a major seaport in what is probably the most seismically-aware and well-prepared country in the world, and which was virtually levelled by a large quake in 1995.

Nevertheless, the uncertainty should not encourage a “we’ll deal with it if and when it happens” attitude among the responsible parties in Metro Manila, and the ordeal of Haiti should have served as a strong reminder of the fate that awaits the metropolis. There are obvious differences between Port-au-Prince and Metro Manila – for one thing, Manila is three times as big – but consider some of the similarities:

• Similar population densities: Port-au-Prince, 13,450/sq. km.; Metro Manila, 14,090/sq. km.
• A significant proportion of the metropolitan area consists of densely-populated slum areas; about 35% of Metro Manila’s population lives in slum areas, and while Port-au-Prince’s statistics are harder to pin down, most estimates put the pre-quake slum population at about 50%.
• A normally-congested street and road network.
• Port facilities located on seismically-unstable reclaimed land, with constricted road access.
• A single airport, which is vulnerable to earthquake damage to some degree. Unlike Port-au-Prince’s main airport, NAIA is much larger with two serviceable runways instead of just one and has ample space to handle a large number of aircraft. But like Haiti’s main airport, NAIA also has a relatively unsophisticated control system and a vulnerable supply chain when it comes to fuel.
• Secondary facilities for the delivery of airborne or ship-borne relief are a considerable distance away. Port-au-Prince is 175 kilometres by road from Haiti’s next largest available port and airport, which are both located in Cap Haitien, on Haiti’s northern coast. Manila is about 117 kilometres from Subic Bay and about 86 kilometres from DMIA, over better roads, and so has an advantage in this respect – provided that critical routes like the NLEX and SCTEX are intact in the wake of a large earthquake.

Addressing these few concerns, even if nothing else is done, would not only help Manila prepare for “the big one,” but would improve the city’s response to any number of disasters, such as the all-too-frequent typhoons or large-scale fires, and contribute to the overall quality of life. In the wake of the government’s pathetic reaction to a comparatively smaller disaster like Ondoy, paying no attention at all to what is a grave eventuality is not only grossly irresponsible, but borders on utter insanity. No one wants to see the heart-rending scenes from Haiti repeated here; if some thought is given to the matter now, perhaps no one ever will, regardless if a big earthquake happens in a year or in a century.

Softball is a sport, not an interview technique

I was recently asked to suggest some questions that could be posed in an interview of a particular political candidate – which one is not important – and since economic issues are the linchpin of the country’s well-being and the subject I personally find most interesting, this is what I came up with, in no particular order:

1. Do you feel the present foreign currency exchange policy – which is officially a floating rate but in practice is managed as a single-currency peg to the US Dollar – is adequate for policies to support export growth and manage debt service? If not, what changes would you propose?

2. Which of the following best describes your position on the national debt:
a) The national debt is a legitimate obligation which should be repaid along the lines of the policy that has been in place for the last several years.
b) The national debt is a legitimate obligation, but the terms should be renegotiated to reduce the proportion of the GDP that is allocated to repaying it.
c) Some of the debts incurred by previous administrations are illegitimate, and should be repudiated entirely. (If this is the case, please give examples.)

3. Agree or disagree: The BSP’s practice of issuing “samurai bonds” several times in recent years has been a safe and effective way to generate cash, and the BSP should be permitted to continue the practice.

4. Do you support a credit-reporting enabling law? Why or why not?

5. Agree or disagree: Special Deposit Accounts offered to banks by the BSP should be abolished or severely limited in order to encourage banks to make more credit available to businesses and consumers.

6. Agree or disagree: The current restrictions and prohibitions of foreign ownership in the Philippines are appropriate and necessary to protect the national patrimony. Competitive levels of FDI can be generated by increasing efficiency and initiating new programs in other areas.

*If you disagree with all or part of the above, which of the following are actions you would consider in changing the overall policy?
a) Remove protectionist clauses from the Constitution, which would invalidate the existing R.A.’s based on them.
b) Reduce restrictions on foreign ownership by making changes applied to some industries and businesses in Lists A & B.
c) Ease or eliminate restrictions on private (non-commercial) land ownership by foreigners.

7. Do you feel the current VAT’s level and structure is appropriate? If not, what changes would you make?

8. Do you feel the current income tax structure – both business and personal – is appropriate? If not, what changes would you make? Regardless of any changes to the tax structure, how would you propose to increase the efficiency and collection performance of the BIR?

9. Do you feel the current tariff structure is appropriate? If not what changes would you make? Regardless of any changes to the tariff structure, how would you propose to increase the efficiency and collection performance of the BOC?

10. Agree or disagree: Some existing government agencies are redundant, and create unnecessary costs and inefficiencies in government regulatory activities.

*If you agree with the above, which agencies would you propose to eliminate, consolidate with others, or privatize?

11. What steps would you propose to encourage formalization of small- and micro-enterprises?

12. How would you propose to resolve the dispute over NAIA 3?

13. A few questions on infrastructure projects, but with an important caveat: Notwithstanding anomalies that have already been associated with some of the following projects that have either been started or proposed, what is your general position on them – i.e., do they have value and should be pursued (under proper management of course), or not?

a) Northrail project.
b) Manila North Harbor upgrade and expansion.
c) Continued subsidization, upgrade, or expansion of the PNR.
d) Metro light rail lines 4, 6, or both.
e) Additional upgrades and/or expansions at SBIA and DMIA.
f) Extension of the SLEX.
g) Nautical Highway.
h) National Broadband Network.
i) Opening of the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, or converting it for operation as a coal- or oil-fuelled facility.

14. Which of the following statements most closely matches your position on OFW’s?
a) OFW’s are a vital part of the Philippine economy, and our current structure for regulating and supporting the OFW sector should be maintained.
b) OFW’s are a vital part of the Philippine economy, but the current structure for regulating and supporting the OFW sector should be revised and strengthened.
c) Initiatives to reduce reliance on OFW’s should take priority over OFW programs.

15. Do you feel the current minimum wage and other wage regulations are adequate, and if not, what changes would you propose?

The platforms of the leading contenders range in quality from “none” to “vague” to “selective,” and the media so far has demonstrated a less-than-impressive ability to elicit substantial information from any of them. The assortment of individual interviews and forum events that have aired do not give much of a clue as to the differences between the candidates or their practical ideas for improving the country, but have rather served as a soapbox for presenting an endless stream of predictable motherhood statements and inspirational blandishments.

Questions like the ones I’ve asked, however, require real answers, and are easy enough for anyone to make up on their own, so long as two simple rules are followed:

1. Don’t reveal your own positions or advocacies by asking leading questions: It is much harder to learn anything if one has preconceived notions. Anyone who has read anything I’ve written in the past six months or so will know that I have certain strong opinions, but those are irrelevant at the moment – the objective is to gather information. Make sure that questions offer clearly opposite choices in their possible answers, regardless of which answer would be preferred. Above all, don’t personalize the questions; they will provide no basis for comparison if they cannot be asked in exactly the same way of any candidate.

2. No open questions: Be specific, and make the questions as close to Yes/No questions as possible. Asking a candidate what his position on corruption is, for example, is going to elicit a vague response: “I’m against it, and will take measures to reduce corruption.” So what? So will everyone else. Instead ask, “Regarding corruption, will you do (A), or will you do (B), or if neither of those, then what (C) will you do, and how does that differ from the other two choices?” Asking only closed-end questions will commit the candidate to a certain definition of himself that can be objectively compared to others’.