Cartoon from The New Yorker.

Two sides of the same coin. There are some people who can grieve calmly and with equanimity. Unfortunately, I am not such a person. I lash out. I turn my rage inward. I isolate.

I look for answers when I know there are none. It’s like banging one’s head against a concrete wall. Again and again and again. Read the rest of this entry »

Senators Enrile and Pimentel threw vicious personal barbs at each other yesterday at the Senate floor, getting one another’s goat by unseemly name-calling. I think Pimentel got the better of the mud-slinging as he touched a raw nerve by calling Enrile the principal administrator of Marcos’ martial law. Enrile admitted to faking his own ambush in order to provide an additional excuse for the imposition of dictatorial rule. He also had Pimentel arrested four times during his incumbency as Marcos’ right-hand man. Mere statements of fact, to be sure, but which cut deep as Mr. Enrile has tried hard to live down his past as a Marcos’ main enforcer. Read the rest of this entry »

To extricate oneself from a sticky situation, suicide is literally the last resort. A person in full possession of all his faculties would naturally hesitate to resort to what has been called a permanent solution to a temporary problem. But there are people and cultures who look upon self-annihilation as a viable option in order to save some vestige of one’s honor. The Japanese are of course well-known for this. Seppuku or ritual suicide is a means not only of recovering some terminal self-respect and atoning for one’s misdeeds. It can also be aimed at shaming a morally bankrupt system to change. This is what spurred Buddhist monks to immolate themselves publicly and dramatically during the Vietnam war. Japanese novelist and ultra-nationalist Yukio Mishima thought he could do this too but only succeeded in killing himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Although it won’t be coming from me.

It’s hard to generate any sympathy for a jerk who has been gifted with so much, in the looks (obviously, as those he bedded are as comely as they come) and brains (he’s an M.D. after all) department, yet has thrown it all away for a few destructive and less-than-cheap thrills. Dr. Kho is proof that moral depravity and plain dumb-ass (those who have seen the videos know that I mean this literally) imbecility cuts across professional boundaries. Somehow this makes us lawyers feel better. Read the rest of this entry »