Tuesday, February 28, 2012

ANL February 2012 Issue


E   D   I   T   O   R   I   A   L

H a p p y    V a l e n t I n e ’ s ,    A s i n g a n !

GO for a gimmick, or for a breather.  Gimmick would be nice a proposal for the love-struck! For dear hometown Asingan,  a breather is most soothing as political climate  simmers rather too early around town.  Either way, Valentine’s Day may be a good prescription to temper emotions, wear away stress and dispel tensions.  

Then we could perhaps buckle down to work  refreshed and focused from a brief respite.

Unluckily though,  Asingan remains just like no other—cocooned in the old silk of patronage politics known derisively as “trapo” [“rag”], or traditional politics. Worse, Asingan’s upbeat mood of having elected two lady top executives of the town was gradually eroded when the fabled “motherly sobriety” of a woman was seen slowly being tainted with distrust and animosity much early in their tandem.

Things soured up reportedly when the administration hiked to a high 300% the rate of realty tax just as the opposition raised questions on the exorbitant cost. Not much later, higher-ups allegedly ordered the installation of a CCTV camera at the office of the vice-mayor less a comely notice. Now comes the jockeying for the 2013 local elections heating up even more the political landscape.

For a three-year term,  hardly anyone would really buy time nor settle for less in deference to the common good; not the “trapos” [traditional politicians], anyway. For worse, the voters and taxpayers are in their usual run struggling to make both ends meet; fending off spiraling costs of farm inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides; reeling on their knees with the pestering weekly hike in oil prices and the concomitant price upheaval of basic commodities including health care and education of rural school children.

Nailing down further the battered rural folks,  farm produce of the farmers are feasted upon by middlemen who rip prices down for rice and vegetables less any remedial efforts from the local government and the National Food Authority to reign in the exploitative feudal relation or rural economic imbalance. Landlocked Asingan is  even less fortunate in having no seashores for fishing to augment scant farming income during off-season.

Genuine development is no less anchored on genuine democracy, that is, attending to the needs of the majority poor and oppressed be it  election year or not. Social change is a patriotic commitment and not a campaign slogan to deodorize narrow selfish interests of politicians and their respective political families and dynasties.

If only for Valentine’s Day,  deeper reflection for a humane social agenda of development among the rural folks  is worth an offering of good faith for genuine social change. Only  then can Asingan NewsLine heartily say “Cheers on Valentine’s!”  eb . anl



N    e    w    s    L    i    n    e

R.A. Class ’68 eyes “cooperative venture”

By:  Engr. Joe L. Sevilla
       Asingan Correspondent

“Go ‘COOP’ and engage in cooperative business venture!”

It sounds both like a marching order and a slogan for members of the Rizal Academy Class ’68 Alumni Association. More than this, it was actually a decision-plan made by the association’s Board of Directors during its first regular meeting this year held January 28 in  Taguig City, Philippines.

In a bid to further consolidate its alumni members after its very first grand reunion and alumni homecoming in 43 years held April last year, the association decided to push through its initial efforts at putting up its own cooperative and seriously engage in business to raise funds and provides services to its less affluent members in particular, and to Asinganians in general.

Putting up a cooperative is considered a sound collective venture and a productive bonding structure for the retiring members of the Class fueled with the desire of serving their mother town Asingan. The Association conducted the requisite Basic Cooperative Orientation Seminar August 2011 with 12 members participating in the 5-hour course held at the residence of classmate Viring Lopez-Jover in Barangay Domanpot.

Rod A. Layco, a CPA-businessman and elected Auditor of the RA Class ‘68 Alumni Association is encouraging the Class to try the trucking business wherein he himself is an official of a freight service cooperative. He is bullish on the idea as he speaks from his profitable experience in cooperative business for years now which for a bonus, he says, is a tax-free venture.  Rod offered to orient the Class on this particular business venture and welcomed us to “loan” a truck unit or two to his trucking cooperative through a MOA [memorandum of agreement] system.

Major highlights of the BOD Meeting were the Chairman’s Achievement Report and the accompanying Financial Report for the April 2011 Reunion-Homecoming. Five key association officers and two adopted class members attended the four-hour meeting that commenced 2pm and ended at 6pm. The tackled agenda and the corresponding minutes of the meeting were immediately signed over by the participating officers after duly re-read by the Secretary. Further agreed on is for the same body to meet upon the arrival from Vancover of  the association’s Chair for External Affairs, Rudy D. Antonio, April 15 this year.  jls . anl



P   U   N   C   H   L   I   N   E

Commentary:   “W h o   i s   w h o?”
                                [First  of  Two  Series]   

By: Ruben M. Balino

“WHO is who” on the matter of deforestation is one heated technical discourse. Some quarters posing as environmental pundits but who actually have stakes in the wood industry even insist that so far no “authoritative” and/or “conclusive” studies would show direct link between deforestation and severe flooding [see ANL’s 1-12 issue]. Further beclouding the issue and insulting common sense, these self-professed experts tend to gang up on the so-called “kaingeros” as the main culprit to deforestation.

But alas! Forestry has been here in this country for almost a century now and here’s an alibi of having no conclusive study yet to boot on these ticklish issues. Blame a senile academe? A mindless government? Or both?

The first forestry graduates of Thailand, Korea and other Asian countries studied at UP Los Banos, Philippines. They founded their respective forestry schools out of what they learned from this country of eloquent and honorable politicians and generals. They nourished their country’s agriculture out of the expertise of their graduates who sacrificed and studied seriously here for years.

Meantime, Lakai Teban Malunao [deceased], an unschooled and soft-spoken Kankannaey native of Benguet province in the Cordilleras, used to lecture and amuse us with stories of  mountains and rivers,  and of a certain  Apo Kabunian—the god and guardian, he said, of  the Cordillera mountain ranges. When still agile and coherent, Lakai Teban recounts every now and then the circumstances leading them to drift deeper into the hinterlands.

Poverty and landlessness, he surmised, forced them up into the slopes of northern Benguet from the fringes of the Cordilleras adjoining the Ilocos provinces up north. He remembered vividly of stranger-claimants, or land grabbers, as rampant in their time when the lands are already cleared and developed by the natives. Writer-environmentalist Stewart Vriesinga calls this the onslaught of “modern predatory civilization”, referring to a variety of intruders to include land speculators and loggers.

Lakai Teban asserts that when they treaded upwards  northern Benguet right before the outbreak of Worl War II portions of the mountains there are already bald or logged-over by “loggers with big machines” [referring to huge trucks and bulldozers].  When the “big machines” are gone, he stressed, small truck owners and “carabao loggers” from the lowlands come in for the “tablon” [small squared log]. Both the small truck owners and carabao loggers are considered illegal [“salabadyok” in native tongue] although they were there to gather the “morsels”, or the much smaller trees spared by tenured loggers.

We do not burn trees, only the wild grasses in the clearings left by the loggers which we eventually inhabited, explained Lakai Teban. We only gather posts for our huts and branches for fuel, he stressed. Big trees are sacred to us, he affirmed, dispelling the wrong notion of the term “slash-and-burn farmers” or kaingeros, or “swidden farmers”, whatever.

Old and unschooled Teban was my first “professor” in forest resource management, forest utilization engineering, and environmental science out and away from the walls of academe. He is a native “forest scientist” in his own right. Incidentally, Lakai Teban is my “Apong Lakai” [grandpa]—“Amang” [father] of my “Inang” [mother].  [To be continued at ANL’s March issue]



L    I    T    E    R    A    R    Y  

A  MATH  STUDENT’S  LOVE  LETTER

[Lifted from the internet and sent via email to ANL by classmate Arno A. Bautista who had just arrived this month from Vancouver, B.C. after a few months’ vacation—for  a “mathematical”  Valentine’s, he jokingly quipped   on the phone. –ed.].

My Dear Love,   

Yesterday, I was passing by your rectangular
house in trigonometric lane. There I saw you with
your cute circular face, conical nose and spherical eyes,

standing in your triangular garden.
Before seeing you, my heart was a null set,
but when a vector of magnitude (likeness) from your
eyes at a deviation of theta radians made a tangent to
my heart, it differentiated.

My love for you is a quadratic equation with
real roots, which only you can solve by making good
binary relation with me. The cosine of my love for you
extends to infinity. I promise that I should not resolve you into
partial functions but if I do so, you can integrate me by
applying the limits from zero to infinity.

You are as essential to me as an element to
a set. The geometry of my life revolves around your
acute personality. My love, if you do not meet me at parabola
restaurant on date 10 at sunset, when the sun is making
an angle of 160 degrees, my heart would be like a
solved polynomial of degree 10.

With love from your higher order derivatives of maxima and minima, of an unknown
function.


Yours  ever loving,


Pythagoras...:)




P.  S .  :

WE at ANL deeply mourn the untimely demise February 11, 2012 of  WHITNEY  HOUSTON, 48 — a legendary, gentle and beauteous lady singer of our time.  Bon voyage to the good life beyond!



E D I T O R I A L    B O A R D


MEMBERS:  Rudy D. Antonio & Arno A. Bautista [Canada Correspondents]; Engr. Silver Casilla  &  RN Merly Grospe-Mayo [U.S. Correspondents];  Engr. Joe  L. Sevilla [Asingan Correspondent];  Col. Lalin Layos-Pascual;  Ross C. Diaz; Engr. Lorie dG. Estrada; CPA Rod A. Layco; Wena A. Balino [Photo & Lay-out Artist]; Ruben “Bencio” Balino [Managing Editor].