Aquino gov't: Making things more difficult

The Easter message of Pres. Benigno "PNoy" Aquino III was for all Filipinos to continue treading the right path. "Daang Matuwid again?" He promised stronger institutions, holding more corrupt people accountable and improved services. Perhaps the President himself should have looked into his own message and pondered what he would do for the remainder of his term? For the last three years, he made too many promises that he could not keep.

He talks about strengthening institutions, yet he does nothing about the Philippine National Police that embraces the new gun law that would have put gun owners into getting a plane ticket to Manila, which is an expensive proposition just to renew their gun licenses. Thanks to the Supreme Court they put a Temporary Restraining Order  against this new gun law. Surely, Mr. Aquino who is a gun enthusiast should have felt the pain of many gun holders especially those of us who do not live in Luzon because it is just too expensive for us to travel to Manila when in the past, it was easy enough to have our guns licensed and renewed.

In my book, what the PNP Firearms Group ought to do is make things easier for gun holders and instead of renewing licenses every three years, make if five years. Now for those who carry their firearms outside their resident, they can do it once a year in their local PNP. What is wrong with this suggestion? Nothing really. But then this is the problem of the Aquino regime, because it wants to use the bureaucracy to make things more difficult.

The same thing is happening in the Department of Foreign Affairs where once upon a time, it wasn't difficult to secure your passport. Today, thanks again to this crazy bureaucracy, the DFA just made things difficult for our people by centralizing the whole process. This is why we're so sick and tired of the Aquino regime's centralizing everything because they have managed to bring the nation back to the days prior to Martial Law when people deal with a government were things were so difficult to do.

As my friend, Engr. Rene Santiago, consultant for the Japanese International Cooperation Agency said about the up and coming Bus Rapid Transit which he says has already been given the go-signal: "While the BRT is already approved, I think it will be finished in 2017 because this project is initiated by the DOTC on the national roads controlled by the DPWH. This is a bureaucratic nightmare that is the major stumbling block to progress when they start the BRT in Cebu."

If you recall, the reason why we Cebuanos through Rep. Raul del Mar came up with the Mactan Cebu International Airport Authority and later the Cebu Port Authority was because we got fed up with national government agencies like the Bureau of Air Transportation  and the Philippine Ports Authority. But we're still stuck with the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board and Land Transportation Office. Unless we come up with a Metro Cebu Traffic Authority the implementation of BRT will be super delayed.

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It's been more than a month since Malaysian Airlines MH 370 disappeared from the radar screen on Mar.8, 2014 and literally disappeared into thin air. The disappearance of this Boeing 777-200ER has baffled the whole world with more than nine countries joining the search for debris. As we entered the Holy Week, the only thing left to do was continue to search for debris in the South Indian Ocean, including a submarine drone, which at first heard some pinging sound of a flight recorder, but the pings have since become silent.

This brings everyone to ask, what happened to such a huge plane? Why did it vanish, and the biggest question of all is where is it now? This disappearance has given in to so many theories, some of which are logical, while others border on the absurd. If a huge Boeing aircraft like the Malaysian Airlines hit the water, chances are, there would be a lot of debris or flotsam that could have been detected. Strangely, with all the search aircraft combing many square miles of ocean, no debris that can be linked to the missing aircraft has been found. So it's really back to square one. Are they really sure that they are looking for the missing plane in the right location?

So what is the end game here? I think the Australian government or the US Navy would simply give up looking for the plane because each day of searching for the missing plane is costing these countries millions in dollars. Who knows if this aircraft was really hijacked and deliberately crashed or soft-landed into the sea so that the plane would sink as a whole into the deep ocean? Of course this is the most logical conclusion. Otherwise, we might as well believe that this plane was abducted by aliens.

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