For the seventeenth year: Welcome to autumn, fuckheads.

ONE of the most frustrating things about the months-long exercise in sialorrheic self-congratulations that the Marcos administration has engaged in about the Philippines having joined the MAGA regime’s “Pax Silica” initiative is that the actual memorandum of understanding (MOU) that started it all in early February has not been made available to the public, at least until now. Even then, it is only obtainable through indirect channels. The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) deigned to provide it upon the request of Congress (more than one request, I heard, but I am not certain) earlier this month in connection with hearings on the 2027 budget. That’s enough of a crack in the Wall of Silence for a sticky-fingered busybody like me, but it’s not really doing a service for the average citizen who has a right to know if his government is selling him out.

OVER the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a somewhat desperate-sounding call to other AI firms to put the brakes on the pace of development, saying that unless some strong guardrails are put i...

FRIDAY, September 11 will mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States in 2001. Around this time every year, I find myself binge-watching videos about the event, and thi...

AS a programming note, I had a different topic in mind for today’s column, but I was somewhat concerned about the reaction it might elicit, so earlier this week I decided to try to smoke out any poten...

IN jaw-dropping news on Wednesday (Sept. 2), Enrique Razon-led Prime Infrastructure Capital Inc. (Prime Infra) announced that it had appointed former BP CEO Tony Hayward to its board of directors. Why...

First of two parts

OVER the weekend, I read an article from one of my innumerable energy-related news subscriptions, a newsletter called Utility Dive, that reported the cancellation by the US Department of Energy on Aug...

ALTHOUGH yesterday (Friday the 21st) was a lovely sunny day here in the ass end of Metro Manila – by my count, the first day in at least 12 with no rain at all – the weather this morning, while still ...

ON Tuesday evening, a day after the unexpected flood emergency that gripped Metro Manila and the surrounding area, I was half-listening to the local TV news when I caught a comment from San Juan Mayor...

OVER the past couple of months, a new hero has emerged here in the Philippines in the person of 21-year-old Alexandra “Alex” Eala, a professional tennis player making waves on the Women’s Tennis Assoc...

Blues Traveler · Four · Song · 1994

OKAY, I’m not a clickbait merchant, and movie reviews – the same could be said of online recipes, now that I think about it – that back into the main point of the post after several paragraphs of driv...

Last of two parts

ALL of what follows, in this installment and the next, was inspired by a single comment to a Facebook post, which I will explain at the end of this column. The real “meat” of this discussion, so to sp...

OVER the past week or so, there has been a rash of reports about Philippine and United States officials slobbering all over themselves with joy at the imagined prospect of the Philippines turning into...

OUR annual business guide, the best (and I think only) one of its kind in the Philippines, The Manila Times 500 (And the next 500) finally hit the street this week. This is the 8th edition of the guid...

ON Monday this week, Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla publicly made two decisions that raise serious and probably unresolvable doubts about his fitness to continue serving in that office. Remulla shoul...

WASTE-TO-ENERGY (WTE) is not literally “bogus” technology, in that it exists and is fairly widely used in developed countries. What is bogus about it is the way it is grossly oversold as an energy sol...

A FRIEND of mine passed along an article on Wednesday morning, a report by Politico from about two weeks ago that explained a sweeping proposal by the European Commission (EC) to cut household electri...

A RECENT news item from Inside Climate News (ICN) noted that there are signs that virtual power plants (VPPs) are gaining more attention in the US, a country that, although it has virtually no other s...

FOR nearly a week, both the online and offline population of the Philippines has been consumed with white-hot anger toward Ateneo de Manila University, following the tragic accident during a training ...

AN update on our little four-legged, stumpy-tailed roommate: Travis arrived on the morning of Tuesday the 9th, and not surprisingly, spent about half a day being freaked out. Think how you would feel ...

Last of two parts

First of two parts

ON Friday, it was reported that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. “ordered the Department of Energy (DOE) and other government agencies to normalize the power situation in the Visayas amid the series of ...

PEOPLE here in the Philippines are often assumed to have the reputation for being rather careless with pets, particularly cats and dogs; it is commonplace to let them roam freely, and as a result, the...

EARLIER this week, the Department of Energy and the Maharlika Investment Fund announced that they were cooperating on the development of a strategic petroleum reserve for the Philippines. It is an obj...

IN my last column (“A better goal for energy expansion,” Sunday, May 31) I discussed the Oplas Index of Energy Abundance (OIEA), a metric developed by my Philstar and BusinessWorld counterpart Bienven...

MY good friend and colleague Noy Oplas, who writes for Philstar and BusinessWorld, introduced last week an intriguing and useful concept he calls the Oplas Index of Energy Abundance, or OIEA, which he...

WITH the announcement today that an arrest warrant and hold departure order has been issued by the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court against former Dept. of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Manuel Bonona...

IN a brief news item over the weekend, it was announced that the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) has established a green energy auction reserve, or GEAR, price for the impending GEA for waste-to-en...

First of two parts

OVER the past couple of weeks there has been growing irritation with increasing electricity bills, with some lawmakers, ever ready to ride whatever wave of public attention is washing past them, chimi...

The massive blind spot in PH tourism aspirations

I MUST begin this column by addressing the overwhelmingly sad news I received late Tuesday afternoon of the passing of The Manila Times’ chairman emeritus and one of my great mentors — really, more of...

I MUST begin this column by addressing the overwhelmingly sad news I received late Tuesday afternoon of the passing of The Manila Times’ chairman emeritus and one of my great mentors — really, more of...