Ghost claims from the City of the Dead

Floyd Mayweather Jr. said: “It’s totally false. I’m not fighting anymore.”

That, to put it bluntly, is Mayweather’s way of telling Manny Pacquiao that talks about a rematch were nothing but ghost stories, emanating from the City of the Dead.

Happy All Souls!

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Mayweather did not say this. But if Pacquiao thinks he honestly deserves a rousing conclusion to his career, the Filipino boxing superhero must face up to reality. He should, for example, try and tackle what his super sly promoter Bob Arum declared about Terence Crawford, clearly now the great big thing in the boxing world.

“Crawford vs Pacquiao would be one hell of a fight,” Arum declared.

Complete with all the blinding blaze, the fireworks!

Or are Pacquiao’s trembling handlers frantically shunning the real thing?

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Anyway, did that claim about the Philippines being on the way to attaining first-world status honestly come from the Malacañang Palace?

Or was it a ghost rehash of one of the ludicrous propositions by the hated dictator who declared martial law, before introducing his phony New Society.

Numbers don’t lie, cried the top resident of Malacañang.

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To clarify, he added: “Under the daang matuwid administration, the infrastructure budget has more than tripled. In 2010, we inherited an infrastructure of P165 milllion. This has increased to P570 billion in 2015.”

But after experiencing first-hand how it was to be swallowed by the deadly Metro traffic monster, he cried: “Last night, I passed through Edsa and really felt the traffic that our citizenry go through.”

At least, he now has an idea that all those unbearable groans of misery all over town, the crunching poverty around us, were not fiction or ghost stories.

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Of course, he will have to step out of his Slogan Kingdom by the dead Pasig, walk our damned city streets, to see for himself that the daang matuwid could also inevitably lead to the dreaded dead-end.

Now, please have a taste of reality reporting, courtesy of Free Baste News: “The Health Department has not reduced the incidence of dengue cases; flooding is still a major problem; the P560 million flood interceptor project in Blumentritt Manila is far from being finished; airport congestion is still a major problem with airplanes made to hover over Naia for two hours before they are allowed to land.”

Meanwhile, the PDEA has revealed that 92.32 percent of barangays in Metro Manila are affected by illegal drugs, while Caloocan City and cities and towns under the jurisdiction of the Southern Police District have been declared 100 percent affected by the drug menace.”

And, wow, we are on the road to achieving first-world status?