Feeling depressed?

Feeling depressed? Don't reach for that anti-depressant pill. It may cost you your life.

Here's the story of Kaili and Breena. 

And here's the dirty story of how a company fabricated data to sell their anti-depressant. They were fined a billion or so but still made money.

Instead of pill, why not go for meditation and exercise.

Here's the story of another company and its bad, bad medicine.

The evil called olanzapine AKA zyprexa, olandus, etc.

My son has been on zyprexa since he was 17. He is now 27. In between, for a very short time, he was also on abilify and another anti-psychotic but we returned to zyprexa for a very interesting reason which will be a subject of another post.

OK, truth to tell, he is not anymore on zyprexa, which costs a fortune, but on olandus which costs one third a fortune through the years. But from the same evil mold: olanzapine.

We have tapered down to less than 5mg. And he is entering another withdrawal phase, I believe. He now spouts expletives and unintelligible words interspersed with "fuck" and "shit". But most of the time he seems to lack life. Gone is his interest in reading (he used to ask me to bring copies of The Economist  from our office library) and in watching Fareed Zakaria and even Bill Maher. He does not even watch videos anymore. He still logs in to FB but his friend from school have since been "unfriended" or perhaps have "unfriended" him.

But we are determined to get him off this psychiatric hellhole.

I think he now  has a slight tardive dyskinesia or whatever. He jogs his head to one side in an awkward manner.

If you are about to take zyprexa for any reason (mostly from prescription by psychiatrists who does not know any better), please read first this story of Sally and the comments of many suffering from the side effects of the drug.

And this also: Carole's story.

Happy new year 2016!

I've been busy in my other blog hence very sparse posting here.

These were duds:


But Happy New Year anyway!!

Update on my [son]:  Making slow progress here and there. He goes out unaccompanied and now spends most of his mall hours at the SM Seaside. Taxi fare is P150 one way. It is about P200 from SM Cebu so we saved a little.

We've learned to let go but still stressed out when it is already dark and he is still not home. We have to rely on the kindness of strangers.

For the past couple of months [he] most often communicates only with hand gestures.

One time he came home on a habal-habal, a motorcycle that serves as taxi, and the driver said he picked him up at SM Seaside after noticing that other habal-habal drivers seemed to ignore him. [My son] was dressed up only in shirt, shorts and slippers. (When he wears his better clothing and shoes we find that he does not have any problem flagging a taxi.) According to the kind driver, [my son] only blurted Talisay when asked where he was going. The driver happened to be from Talisay also so he gave [my son] a ride home (for P150). Along the way [my son] was only making hand gestures to guide the driver. This he does also to taxi drivers according to a couple that I interviewed when I chanced on meeting them while waiting for [my son] to reach home.

Update on medication. Robert Whitaker has another article on madinamerica.com confirming the uselessness of anti-psychotic drugs such as [my son] is taking.

We are down to less than 1/2 of his olanzapine.

Note: As of September 25, 2016 I have edited out the name of my son to protect his privacy.

An open letter in behalf of my strange son

The full name of my son is [edited out for privacy]. It comes from the Cebuano word [edited out] which means someone to look up to or honorable.

For a couple of years now he has been behaving strangely, taking him on a path away from the meaning of his name, hence the title of this post. In this open letter I would like to ask the forgiveness of those who have been on the receiving end of this strangeness.

He was not always like that. Like me he was kind of shy and reserved around people but can be talkative at times among friends and family. As a child he was very sensitive; tears would well in his eyes when he was chided by his siblings and me even over simple matters.

[Nickname of my son], as he is known in the family,  is the second child of three siblings; sandwiched between two girls. Just like his sisters he was born through natural childbirth in our little rented room in Tormis St., Sambag, Cebu City. I was then working in a regional office of a government bank while their mother was working with the Talisay local government as a day care teacher. The children were all delivered safely by Mrs. Ramirez, a midwife of Talisay LGU, who was a close friend of my wife.

We moved to Talisay, the hometown of my wife, when he was 5 years old. In the elementary (public school like the rest of his siblings)  he was a boy scout and, as almost all kids do, spent a lot of time in basketball. He would oftentimes get a dressing down from me about wasting his time on a sport meant for tall people. In college he grew to be 5'9" tall; still short for my standard though he was 1 inch taller than me. Looking back at this now with regrets I think I must have contributed to his strangeness.

As an episode of this strangeness, I learned from our youngest daughter, He has been sending explicitly vulgar chat messages to a Ms Angela. His tweets to Ms Kathryn Bernardo have been rather crude. He sometimes fail to sign out from his FB and twitter hence our discovery.

I hope Ms Angela, Ms Bernardo, and others would find in their hearts a place for forgiveness for Hal. Ms Angela, I believe, is a fine young lady from the snippets of posts I saw in my son's FB account when he was not yet unfriended. Ms Bernardo is also one of the fine artists in the country. My wife, and daughters are ardent fans. So is my son despite his strangeness.

I will explain in another post what led to this strangeness. This is getting tiresome for a  senior citizen who had hoped to spend his retirement years in peace.

In the meantime here are similar poignant stories from a father, and a mother whose son is as strange as mine:

A Mother and Son's Journey by Rossa Forbes

 My Mysterious Son by Dick Russel

Note: As of September 25, 2016 I have edited out the name of my son to protect his privacy.

Need a sketch for MCWD? Here's an easy way.

We applied for water connection with the MCWD. And they needed a sketch. Thanks to Google Map, we attached these to our application:

And the details came from Google earth:

We used this also when we applied for a Cignal connection two years ago.

This RJ45 fails

This batch of RJ45 plugs is crappy.

This morning Danel and Conde visited Dodon and played games on the xbox. The wireless connection was spotty.

After Dodon's pals went home  I made a patch cable to connect our xbox to our router. I was meaning to do this for a long time now. Yesterday, Dodon and I were at the SM. We dropped by Ace Hardware and bought  RJ45 plugs. 

But the plug does not seem to be of the kind that I have in my other patch cables. The cable tester does not show a good connection.The plug does not fit snugly into a port; it won't click in place and falls off at a touch. I think I need to get some real plugs from AC-DC or Advance Electronics.

14 January 2015. OK, I was wrong. It was not the RJ45 plugs that were crappy but this crimper I bought from CDR King:

So I got this one which worked fine, but a little pricey, from Harmanson:

You get what you pay for.

Seasons greetings

Due to my other blog, I did not have time to put my random thoughts here. Next year, I think I will have time to spare.

Much of my thoughts nowadays, however, is about the iatrogenic condition of my son. It is almost eight years now since he was started on medication. It was only towards the end of 2013 that we began to learn about the side effects of neuroleptics. 

Thanks to Robert Whitaker, Monica Cassani, Will Hall, and many other great guys, we are beginning to understand the problem. 

The healing of our son will be a slow but exciting process for the family.

Happy new year!

Who benefit from lower tax rates?

See my post here.

Hiking through the SRP

I have been planning for a long time to hike through the South Road Properties. I finally did it with Dodon on March 30, 2014, Sunday, starting at about 4:30 PM.

 We started here. The skyline of downtown Cebu City is visible in the back.

To our right, across the road, is the SM construction. 

Looking towards former Kawit Island.

 Another view of Cebu City skyline from Kawit Island.

 Can we call this the pissing fountain?

The Lantaw restaurant at SRP.

 The guard is telling us that we were

 not supposed to be walking through SRP.

This is now the Talisay side.

Year-end spoiler: Mt. Bihonan of Talisay

Spoiling our rest these holidays has been the constant spewing of acrid smoke from a noodle factory in our neighborhood.

The smoke leaves black soot on the window screens which have to be scrubbed hard with soap and water else no air could get inside during those times when you can open your windows which has been rare this past months.

Best laid plans

Haven't posted here for quite some time because I was busy with my other blog (see here).

But I need to record this.

Beginning of October the family planned to go on vacation. The last one together was years ago.

We decided on a 2-day fling in Panglao, Bohol as the most affordable and convenient for our office and class schedules. Honi will be on sem break from her last year at Don Bosco. Mamay has filed a leave from her audit work. Dodon is out of school (hopefully temporarily) and Nanay is long overdue for a break.

Mamay made reservations with Lost Horizon. We made a down payment of 1K. Our vacation would be October 30 to November 1. I made arrangements with my manager so that she would not go on official trips on those days. Mamay filed a week-long leave.

We mapped out the tours to make the best use of our time. Feeding our dog, Dingky, would have to be arranged with Nanay's sister who is a neighbor.

Then while we were still preparing for breakfast during the Muslim holiday of October 15, the bowels of the earth sent a big tremor upwards on the island of Bohol disfiguring the tour sites we were supposed to see and leaving suffering in much part of the island.

What to do with the leave of absence we had already filed? We decided to go to Camotes instead and made the necessary plans. We picked Bano Beach resort and got in touch with management. Payment of reservation was done through kwarta padala of Lhuillier. Another non-refundable 1K.

All bags were packed in the evening of October 29. By 8AM of October 30 we alighted from a Ceres bus near the Port of Danao only to find a long line of passengers with nowhere to go. The first trip of the vessel turned back when the port on Camotes was already in sight. The waves were too big. All trips on that day were cancelled.

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

                - Robert Burns, 1785

-Robert Burns, 1785 

115th Independence Day?

It should be July 4, some say, because on June 12 some 115 years ago we were really not yet independent.

My take: it is from the day the last American military force pulled out from the Philippines some 20 years ago. Here's a good piece that I can recommend.

I remember Pres. Cory marching to the Senate on a rainy day just to ask the Philippine Senate not to end the  treaty which allowed US military forces on Philippine soil. It was one of the grand moments of the Senate, I must say.

I also remember Richard Gordon, many others, but mostly Gordon,  ranting and warning about the end of the Philippines with the departure of the Americans. No such thing happened. In fact Gordon and his volunteers kept Subic floating. Gordon was wrong on that account but he and his volunteers also proved that we do not have to rely on others to prop us up. I salute Gordon and his volunteers for that.

Altho the Americans gave us "independence", it came with many pre-conditions. See this article in Wikipedia for the many "strings attached".

So, we have only been independent for 20 years yet. We have done a lot in those years. We can do more in the next. Looking forward to it.

Until then let's sing the Philippine National Anthem:

Ipad stylus for sale

When my brod sent me an Ipad (the first generation) for my law study, I had him load it with Notetaker, NotesPlus, Noteshelf, etc. I thought I would be jotting down class notes. I scrambled for a stylus to use along with the notetaking apps.

I got the iStroke for around P1,500. But after a year or so of use it won't work anymore. And I found out that I rarely used them for notetaking in classes. Typing on a real keyboard was faster. The IPad became just a bookreader.

And styli from China now come in all sized  just cost P30 at CDRKing. Here they are side by side.

Living in the past: the North Borneo claim

There are a lot of discussions again about the Philippine claim over North Borneo. The latest resulted from the furor caused by a group of Tausogs, followers of Sultan Kiram, holing themselves up somewhere in North Borneo to press their claim of sovereignty, actually for rentals.

Prof. Solita Monsod in her column in the Philippine Inquirer said that the Sultanate of Sulu has historical rights over North Borneo because in 1685 the Sultan of Brunei awarded it to the Sultan of Sulu for helping him defeat Brunei rebels. Then she proceeded to criticize the way Spain ceded the Philippines to the USA without, in effect, asking the Filipinos.

If it was wrong for Spain to cede the Philippines to the U.S., without a by-your-leave,  was it not wrong for the Sultan of Brunei to cede North Borneo to the Sultan of Sulu. 

But these things was par for the course in the ancient past. Lands and territories were passed from one potentate to another to the detriment of the inhabitants. Land and people were treated like ranches and cattle. 

That was wrong and so were the subsequent acts arising from it such as the rental claimed by the Sultan of Sulu about which the recent furor is all about. 

This is the internet age; let's stop reliving the past.

Travails of a desktop PC buyer

Our 5-year old desktop PC finally bowed out of service after Christmas. It was powered by a Core 2 Duo processor and a 512MB Inno 3D video card. The rig was not the fastest when I bought it because it was what my budget could afford. But it's 150GB hard disk was considered big then. When the hard disk conked out in 2011, its replacement with 1 terabyte capacity was just considered a medium one.

I think the processor simply gave up when it was subjected by my son to his Starcraft game, so I begun looking for a new unit. The monitor, keyboard, and mouse are still working well, so we decided to get only a new CPU.

It was a choice of going to Nutech or PC Quickbuys. I bought a few items before from Nutech and I was pleased with their service and prices. I was also a customer of Thinking Tools, the owner of PC Quickbuys, for years and had no problem with them.

In all this, I forgot about PCExpress where I got my original rig. They were pleasant to deal with when I bought my old desktop and when its video card was replaced later. And I now think that is when my trouble started.

As much as possible, I prefer getting equipment that needs heavy lifting from a roadside outlet. It's much of a hassle lugging a desktop out of a mall after buying and back into the mall to get it repaired.  But it was already Sunday, January 6, when I finished  picking from the price list of PC Quickbuys the components that should go into our new desktop. The PC Quickbuys store across the street from UC is closed on Sundays, so SM was the place to go.

Our first configuration consisted of:

1. Processor - i5-3570
2. Motherboard - Asus P8B75-M LE
3. Video card - Asus EAH6570
4. Memory - Kingston 4G, 2 pcs 
5. casing and power supply with enough 

We would still be using the same hard disk as it still working.

Plan B, just in case we'd be tempted by a higher processor, was

1. Processor - i7-3770, other items unchanged or

But it was not to be that day. We found out that PC Quickbuys did not have the items we have configured on paper. We settled on the following:

1. i5-3470 , cheaper but lower in power
2. motherboard - Asus P8Z77 (more expensive)
3. video card - Sapphire Radeon HD6570
4. memory - Kingston 8GB. I preferred to use 2 pcs of 4Gb to utilize the dual channel feature of the motherboard.

It was around 1 PM when we paid for the items and were told to come back by 3:30PM to get the assembled rig. But when we went back we were simply told that the chipset of the motherboard would not recognize our hard disk. We were advised to reformat the disk before we can use the PC. I suggested that they test the rig with a working hard disk of their own but it seems they did not have one. Believing their statement that all that I need to do was to reformat the disk and reinstall the OS, we went home feeling a little disappointed. I would have left a tip as usual but decided not to.

We immediately reformatted the hard disk as suggested but the OS wouldn't install. We decided to do a clean format of the disk by attaching it to a notebook. When it was replaced in the CPU, still the OS would not install but instead the monitor went blue with lines of error text on it.

On Friday evening, January 11, Dodon (my son) was full of suggestions he got from googling. He was adamant on getting online. We tried the suggestions and finally got the OS installed and the desktop was up and running by midnight. It appeared that the technician hooked up the SATA cable to the SATA 3.0 Gb/s connector on the motherboard. When it was hooked up that way, the SATA configuration on the BIOS should be set to IDE Mode instead of the AHCI Mode in order for the motherboard to recognize the hard disk. The AHCI mode was the proper mode if the hard disk was connected to the 6 Gb/s connector which it was not.

Finally I can update my lawblog. I still prefer the big keyboard over those of the notebooks at home. Thanks but no thanks to PC Quickbuys.

First hand experience with doomsday

December 21, 2012 has come and gone. And we are still around. The Mayans, if they were that great at predictions, should be the dominant race by now.

In the early 70's I was teaching fisheries and general science in the Dinagat Fishery High School. I was 19 when I first taught and left after two years. See here for the reason I quit.

I was living with Mano Boning and Nang Tolang and their twin children; an older son was studying in college somewhere I cannot remember now but probably Cebu City. Manong Boning was a utility man of the school while the wife was an elementary school principal.

One evening the couple asked me to go with them and the twins to the big house of Mayor Ecleo. They said that a big earthquake would happen that night and the only safe place would be the home of   the Mayor which was then newly finished and located on a ridge of a hill which had a good view of the Dinagat harbor.

Out of courtesy to my hosts, who treated me like a son, I went. At any rate, I was also curious to see the interior of the mansion. I found assembled there the top aides of the Mayor and other government officials including the DepEd school supervisor. I asked him, in amusement,  what the heck the two of us were doing there as we were not members of the sect founded by the Mayor. And, by all means, we did not believe that doomsday was indeed coming.

After midnight we were told that it was already safe to go home. Somehow the calamity was abated.

Surmising now, I think the supervisor was just there to show his support for the Mayor as I was just for Mano Boning and family. But I was pretty sure then that there was no great calamity coming because  it was still to be in 1975 as taught by Herbert W. Armstrong, the leader of the Worldwide Church of God to which I belonged.

Armstrong had this booklet 1975 in Prophecy which shaped the thinking of church members about doomsday. It was the reason that in 1968 I chose to study fisheries in Zamboanga City instead of accepting the offer of my father to send me to FEATI (then one of the better technological schools) to take up electronics engineering. 1975 was coming and the world - society, not the earth - was coming to its end. I took the two and half year fishery curriculum which would give me ample time to prepare before 1975 came. All members of the Worldwide Church of God were supposed to become rulers in the world tomorrow after the crisis of 1975 and should be prepared to be leaders. Whew!

The Armstrong church has since split into many branches. I left the church, a few years after the death of Armstrong, having learned of its cultic nature first here and in many other places. This site is highly recommended for an in-depth knowledge of the cultic practices of the original Armstrong group.

I forsook religion altogether and its many doomsday predictions. And what a relief it has been ever since. Alas, the 1975 booklet is still reproduced here. This is one of the typical illustrations from the booklet:

Been there, done that!

This reminds me of great company

I was reading the column Viewpoint of Juan L. Mercado and was struck by the familiar ring in this paragraph:

“Then and now, it is still the poor who bear the brunt.” One recalls a Grade One teacher who checked why a child was crouching below her desk. She didn’t want us to see her eat her breakfast of green papaya soaked in salt and vinegar.

After two years of teaching high school in Dinagat Island I decided to go back to Cebu to find another job nearer my mother and siblings. We lost our father two years before in a political murder in Zamboanga del Sur where we were living at the time. We were settled with our grandfather in Cebu when I found the teaching job in Surigao.

When one year passed and me still jobless I enrolled in an electronics course at the former Cebu School of Arts and Trades. I had to scrimp on everything because for my expenses I relied on my mother, a public school teacher, and my grandfather who was a small-town councilor.

During lunchtime I would seek out a vacant room. I would go to a corner, arrange an armchair to face the wall, and proceed to arrange my food on the arm of the chair. The food which I prepared was almost always corn, fried sayote, and soup from the morning's inun-unan.

The first time I did that ritual I heard, halfway through my poor baon, noises from behind. When I turned to find out, I saw three other poor students arranging their food on the armchairs. Each was facing the other corners of the classroom. Great company!

I presume they are now better off than I am since I had a little hard time getting a good job after leaving CSAT while many of my classmates immediately made it to the big companies which were then sprouting up in the new Mactan Export Processing Zone.

Why Nations Fail

The new blog I am following and recommends: Why Nations Fail. I hope to have some spare money after buying law books and buy the book.

Surface Deja Vu

I have been following the Surface tablet since it surfaced on my favorite sites for tablet news. My iPad 1 is already an orphan. It doesn't have camera, cannot run the newest iOS, and inking is terrible even with a stylus. I have on it NotesPlus, NoteTaker, and Noteshelf which I thought would replace my need for pen and notebook as touted. Not really.

GoodReader has been more useful. I did not have the need to bring bulky books anymore. Black's Law Dictionary was also a very good help. But something was still missing. I missed Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. The Pages I have on the iPad has been left unused. I wasted $9 on it. I still have to do my word processing on my home desktop and my daughter's notebook.

I was looking for a tablet that could run MS Office at a price comparable to iPad. I think the Surface RT is a viable candidate. But I also need a pdf reader for my books. I found PDF Exchange Viewer as the best in its price range: free. But I understand it is not possible to install on the Surface RT any apps you wish. It's possible on the Surface Pro but the price is a little stiffer.  However, if for that price MS Office is also pre-loaded, then I'll go for it.

Now comes this ad on the Surface which brought back not-so-pleasant memories.





The place where the ad was shot is the former HQ of the Worldwide Church of God where I wasted 30 years of my life. The church splintered into many small groups after the death of its founder. The lucky guys who managed to get hold of the headquarters offices sold the place to another church afterwards and moved to a cheaper location. Most probably because they did not have enough tithes and offerings from their dwindling membership to maintain the Ambassador College campus and the Ambassador Auditorium which the original group boasted as among the best in the world. About the college, it is mostly church hype to encourage members to donate more. As regards the auditorium, there is some truth to it. See here.

The auditorium and the administration building, which is in the background of the guy in the above video, are now owned by another church which, I understand, asked its member to pledge  a lot of money each in order to buy the place. Deja vu.

WCG ministers used to tell the members that they have not given enough if the giving does not hurt.  Sadly, the splinter groups are still at it. See here. Shame, shame, shame!

What a relief, I am past that. I am now here. Just kidding!  But it sure is a better alternative for WCG exiters and other former religionists who needed release! To know what I believe now, see here, here, or here.

And, oh, I am definitely replacing my iPad. Not sure yet if it will be a Surface, though.

And before I forget, how much did Microsoft pay the new owner of  the WCG HQ for the shoot? Eat your heart out former WCG members. LOL.

Peace in Mindanao, finally?

About four years ago I blogged about the Mindanao conflict. I am not sure now what events in Mindanao happened at around that time that caused me to write that blog. In fact I only called it a draft and hoped I had the time to finish it.

Right now my thoughts about Mindanao is about the recently-signed GPH-MILF Framework Agreement.

Could this mean I might be able in my lifetime to bring my children to Dimataling and show them the place where I spent my childhood?

Altho I am a non-believer, but for lasting peace in Mindanao; for the blood of my father, uncles, and cousins who died violently as a result of the decade-long conflict; for my Muslim and non-Muslim friends and their families who have suffered more than enough already; I am almost about to shout Alahu Akbar!