Art of throwing away taxpayers' money

Year by year, for the past many years, the government has been dumping millions upon millions of pesos on seminars and conferences that bear negligible-to-zero benefits to Juan de la Cruz. Many, if not most, of the topics taken up in these gatherings have very little informative value -- and they are repetitious, irrelevant, or even downright silly. Whatever relevant information ensues from these money-guzzling gatherings can be adequately covered by circulars and memoranda, at a lot less cost to the taxpayers.

Why is the government splurging on expensive seminars that have practically no value to Juan de la Cruz, in terms of public service? The answer is money. Seminars have become big business for private organizers and their cohorts in government. Aside from the organizers and their government patrons, the big profit-takers from seminars are hotel owners, manufacturers and suppliers of souvenir knick-knacks like kits, bags and other handouts. Stripped of their high-falutin advertisements and well-crafted objectives, some seminars can be categorized as legalized racket.

In its totality, government expenditures on seminars must be mind-boggling. The exercise impinges on the finances of even the poorest-of-the-poor local government units. This is true, especially in the case of municipalities whose mayors are always fishing for an opening to go gallivanting or junketing at taxpayers' expense. It would be interesting if the government's watchdog agencies, notably the Ombudsman and the Commission on Audit, could come up with a comprehensive report on how much of the taxpayers' hard-earned money is channeled annually to seminars and other gatherings of dubious value to the people.

I am sure many STAR readers do not know the following:

* If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.

* Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to slow a film down, so you could see his moves.

* The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA.

* Every person has a unique tongue print.

* 315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

* On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

* Chocolate kills dogs. Chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system, and a few ounces are enough to kill a small-sized dog.

* Donald Duck comic were banned in Finland because he does not wear pants.

Here is another thought-provoking section in Michael Lerner's important book, Choices in Healing, which should be of interest to cancer patients and their care-givers:

I place such emphasis on the significance of healing with cancer because I believe that awareness of the power and process of healing is the key to informed choice in all areas of cancer: choice in mainstream therapies, choice in complementary therapies, choice in life with cancer, choice in response to pain and suffering, and choice in living and dying.

There is no single right way to respond to any of the choices, large or small, that cancer brings. You will certainly experience pressures from physicians, family, and friends to choose one course over another. Physicians will offer you the best conventional medical wisdom about therapies. Family and friends may urge you to try alternative therapies, or conversely urge you not to try them. People may expect you to continue to live the way you did before, to continue to respond to them in the same ways. Or they may urge new ways of life on you.

At every turn there are bewildering arrays of choices, and often there is no adequate external guidance that you can count on. So when all the information is before you, consider turning inward to discover from as deep a source as possible what makes sense to you.

Information can help us develop maps of informed choice. But the healing process can be the inner compass by which we read these maps. Healing helps us discover "which way is up" -- for us. Healing encourages us to move upward, toward higher and more integrated levels of awareness, toward courage, toward expansion -- if not toward extension -- of life, and toward becoming more deeply the person we want to be.

PULSEBEAT: Professor Ingo Potrykus, a molecular biologist in Switzerland, was recently awarded a $30,000 prize by the Kumho Cultural Foundation in South Korea. His achievement, which has been heralded in agricultural and scientific circles, is his successful use of genetic engineering to develop a form of rice containing beta-carotene. This will provide Vitamin A to human beings, and help eliminate a major nutritional deficiency in millions of people, causing mainly blindness. The new rice, called "Golden" because of its color, will soon be made freely available for distribution to subsistence farmers . . . Pal Castillo, who is active in church work at the Sacred Heart Parish at Brookside Hills, Cainta, Rizal, is one fellow who takes a deep interest in issues affecting our country and communities. I hope he will take time to articulate his and his fellowmen's thoughts on raging issues of the day.

Art A. Borjal's e-mail address: <[email protected]>