SOMETHING Wicked This Way Comes
is a 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury about two 13-year-old best friends and their experience with a traveling carnival that comes to their Midwestern home in Illinois.
The opening pages gives this eerie feeling of the impending nightmarish experience – uneasy stillness, dark clouds approaching – the same eerie feeling you get when you open your newspaper, TV news or Facebook timeline.
From out of the blue huge dump trucks and other heavy equipment start dumping and spreading “synthetic white sand” on the Manila Bay shoreline in a move to improve the aesthetics of the area.
The Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) wants to include Netflix, Iflix and all other internet video streaming services in their area of coverage.
The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) is cracking down on “unregistered” online sellers.
Former Ozamiz City councilor Ricardo “Ardot” Parojinog was found dead in his detention cell in an Ozamiz Police Station. Ricardo is the brother of the former Ozamiz Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog who was killed in a bloody police raid in July 2017. Reynaldo's wife and several of their relatives were also killed in the simultaneous raids. Their children, meanwhile, were arrested and are facing drug-related charges. The Parojinog family has been marked as an alleged drug and crime syndicate based in Ozamiz.
The travails of ABS-CBN continue even after it has been closed down and forced to shutter its broadcast operations. Forced to contend with much lower revenues with its remaining cable and internet casting, congressmen and a government unfriendly to the Lopez family are hell-bent on shutting down the remaining Skycable and online streaming, especially of its news operations. ABS-CBN News regional operations have all closed down and more than half of its 11,000 workers have been retrenched, contractors have been halted including a whole division of survey company Kantar media which was devoted to tracking performance of the broadcast station. Popular radio and television shows have likewise been halted as part of the scaling down.
As if these were not enough, paid mainstream media online hacks and trolls have continued their viscous attacks on ABS-CBN in an attempt to twist facts or lie outright about the negative effects of the closure on news media freedom and economic activity. The latest from a gossip monger pretending to be a business columnist claiming that top Lopez officers got a huge pay raise while retrenching ABS-CBN personnel, citing legal disclosure that were clearly of companies outside of ABS-CBN and years prior to the station’s closure in 2020.
Heir apparent to broadcast ratings GMA7 is running paranoid that they’re next in line for media control that they hastily got rid of their PDRs – which was set up and worded exactly as ABS-CBN’s – because it was used against their rival station as a closure issue. And now one of their top news talents has been exposed by former OFW Sarah Balabagan for having impregnated her when she was a minor.
Congress has approved a Bill declaring an Ilocos holiday for the late ousted dictator and plunderer Ferdinand E. Marcos.
The citizen’s major line of defense against COVID 19, the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth), has been exposed as having been plundered of billions by functionaries appointed by presidents past and present, and from personnel within who have made it a career learning to work the system. President Rodrigo Duterte’s latest move is to appoint a CEO formerly from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) whose first public statement was that he knows nothing of healthcare but, presumably, was placed there by Duterte to investigate and clean up the agency.
Meanwhile, PhilHealth remains as confused as ever on how to deliver Universal Healthcare as mandated by law, its website for member services offline, its people giving clients conflicting statements on whether their medical expenses are covered or not.
Schooling has all but confused all – students and parents – on whether online schooling or take home modules actually work, if ever they are even available or accessible. Even teachers are going into fits of depression. TV and radio learning channels as promised by government are still out there in limbo. More and more people are starting to believe students should be given a year off.
So what’s going on? Could it be related to the University of The Philippines (UP) data scientists’ forecast that COVID 19 cases will hit 585,000 by December 2020? What are the national government and our health officials doing?
Are we, the people, left to our own devices?
What wickedness this way comes?
