As the year starts, it is not my wish to spoil and shoot the euphoria. It would be rather easy to close our eyes of the negatives and focus on the positives.

The bandwagon mentality would rather shut our eyes to the inconveniences of seeing these sad realities on the road , no not the gaping holes and re blocking, they are small in number nowadays, but these statistics are rather alarmingly, unchanged. The number of houses on the roadsides of Leyte and Samar, uninhabited and slowly intruded by weeds ,destroyed and rendered dilapidated by the elements.

The sad case of dwellings lacking of humans as settlers. What i saw were frogs , roaches , rats and perhaps snakes. And sadly, many of them are in advanced entropy.

Whatever happens to the billions worth of public funds ( read : taxes), that was used to finance shelters for the people only to be used by pests and inavaded by weeds?
We do not wish to sow intrigues,nor plant ill will in the opening days of a new year, but we cannot help but feel sad.

We cannot help but grind our teeth in diay looking at those countless houses that could have been homes ,not a monument to man’ s greed and foolish ways to circumvent proper specifications for profit…grind our teeth in dismay.

This year , my wish is to see these empty houses, filled with real people not with regrets and smorgasbord of pests and weeds I don’t know if the Senate could probe the same but on second thought, we cannot name people or entity punished due to their probe.

But perhaps, the conscience that our officials have may prove to be more effective.
And perhaps Karma will strike the culprits soon.

But till then, these houses are not homes at least to humans. They are hatcheries, breeding grounds to all things bad and ugly. And the evil men continues to laugh their way to the banks.

And you, hapless tax payers ,grumble and curse, because you dont have a home of which is unencumbered,unhinged and not tied to a mortgage. While these houses numbering to hundreds perhaps a thousand ,slowly but surely fade into unstoppable decay…

ONE of the things that St. John the Baptist did was to testify who Christ really was—that he was “the Son of God.” (cfr. Jn 1,29-34) This detail is crucial for us because once we know who Christ really is, then we would know who we really are, since we are supposed to be patterned after Christ.

Let’s remember that we have been created by God to be his image and likeness. And Christ, being the Son of God, is the perfect image God has of his own self. We are therefore patterned after him. How he is, is also how we should be.

We, of course, are made to choose, free as we are, whether we want to be like Christ or not. That is actually the purpose and the test we are given here in our earthly sojourn. We should be very aware of this condition in our life.

That the Son of God became man in order to save us can only mean that we are so special to God that he cannot kind of “afford” to lose us, even if he loses nothing if we choose to be lost. It can mean that how God the Father treats his Son in God’s trinitarian life is also how he treats us. His love for the Son which is eternal and boundless is also lavished on us, a love that is boundless and goes all the way to offer one’s life.

We have to be clear about this point. We are meant to assume the identity of Christ. And that is not a gratuitous, baseless assertion, much less, a fiction or a fantasy. It is founded on a fundamental truth of our faith that we have been created by God in his own image and likeness.

We have to arrive at that point where we can make St. Paul’s words as our own too: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.” (Gal 2,20)

We just have to learn to set aside whatever difficulty or awkwardness we may have in dealing with this basic truth of faith about ourselves. We have to try our best to know Christ and to adapt his very own mind and will, his own ways, behavior and reactions to whatever situation we may find ourselves in.

What is also clear is that Christ is actually already living with us. He is in us as the pattern and perfecter of our humanity, and the savior of our damaged humanity. We just have to learn to live with Christ. He is never far or indifferent to us. Even in our miserable and wounded condition, he continues to be with us, showing us with greater solicitude. It’s rather us who tend to ignore and contradict him.

The ideal condition to have is first to know and love God so that we may know and love ourselves and others properly. This was what St. Augustine precisely said. “Noverim te, noverim me,” Latin for “May I know God, may I know myself,” St. Augustine said. It is when we know and love Christ first that we can know who we really are and ought to be. God is our Creator and Father in whose image and likeness we have been made. How he is, who is pure love in essence, is also how we ought to be.

In “an attempt to make the Philippines self-sufficient in salt production, a senior administration lawmaker Rep. Ron Salo of party-list Kabayan, authored and sponsored HB 1976. The Salo House Bill aims to revitalize the country’s salt industry through “comprehensive salt industry development program”.

HB 1976 mandates the Philippine government to provide technical. Physical and financial assistance to sea salt farmers, including artisanal salt farmers, to develop and improve their craft. Likewise, tasks the government to invest in the identification and construction of salt farms for lease to qualified salt farmers (individuals, cooperatives or corporations).

Rep. Salo attributes the country’s dependence on imported salt product by pointing out what he calls “an outdated policy regime, low quality control and product improvement, limited development of new production areas, unattractive business environment for small enterprises and lack of new investments.” He (Salo) is happy that key stakeholders supporting his Bill include the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), Cooperative Development Authority (CDA) and Department of Science and Technology (DOST) as well as colleagues Reps. Richard Gomez (Leyte), Gerville Luistro (Batangas) and France Castro (ACT-party-list).

MY COMMENT:

As a marine biologist, I am well aware of the Philippines sea water area being an archipelagic country having 36,000 plus kilometers of shoreline, longer than that of continental USA – that can be utilized for massive salt production. And, therefore I find it ironic for our country to import 93 percent of its salt requirement. I have no information from a company whose top man told me about their salt-making project in Pangasinan?
ooo000ooo
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Many of my friends and colleagues who are now working in the United States keep on boasting about where they are now and what they have become, as though they are now in heaven. Some of them are enticing me to go there as though it is the best place to be.

But I am not at all impressed. I know a lot about Bible prophecies that, today, things are running from bad to worse, even in the US.

Yes, economic conditions just keep getting worse. Now that we have entered 2023, we find ourselves in high-inflation environments while economic activity is gradually slowing down. Just like in 2008, employers are conducting mass layoffs as a horrifying housing crash sweeps across that nation.

In the online magazine, Prophecy News Watch, we can read the following 15 recent facts that prove a massive economic meltdown is already happening right now:

1. Home sales have now fallen for 10 consecutive months.
2. Existing home sales are down 35.4 percent over the last 12 months, the largest year-over-year decline in existing home sales since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
3. Homebuilder sentiment has now dropped for 12 consecutive months.
4. Home construction costs have risen more than 30 percent since the beginning of 2022.
5. The number of single-family housing unit permits has fallen for nine months in a row.
6. The Empire State Manufacturing Index has plunged “to a reading of negative 11.2 in December”.
7. In November, Americans witnessed the largest decline in retail sales that they have seen all year long.
8. Even the biggest names on Wall Street are starting to let workers go.
9. The Federal Reserve is admitting that the number of actual jobs in the United States has been overstated by over a million.
10. U.S. job cuts were 417 percent higher in November than they were during the same month a year ago.
11. A recent Wall Street Journal survey found that approximately two-thirds of all Americans expect the economy to get even worse next year.
12. A newly released Bloomberg survey covered that 70 percent of U.S. economists believe a recession is coming in 2023.
13. Inflation continues to spiral wildly out of control.
14. Overall, vegetable prices in the United States are more than 80 percent higher than they were at this same time last year.
15. Thanks to the rapidly rising cost of living, 63 percent of the U.S. population is now living paycheck to paycheck.

We may not understand all of these, but to desperately get inflation under control, the Federal Reserve has been dramatically increasing interest rates, causing the housing market to crash, but Fed officials insist that such short-term pain is necessary to tame inflation.

Given all this, I am not attracted to this Filipino dreamland anymore. The US is now too different from what it used to be. These countrymen who are boasting of their new-found social and economic status in this country are perhaps not reading news updates about what’s going on there, economically that is.