TO be quite honest, there was a moment of fear, nervous apprehension that an Orwellian Big Brother was monitoring my every post.

As melodramatic as that may sound, you’ll feel it, and be ashamed of yourself for feeling it, when, after such an innocent move as reposting an inspirational maxim (I think I was reposting a Krishnamurti quotation), you get a message as I did several days ago: “Account Restricted.

You can’t post or comment for 24 hours.” I clicked on the button “Why?”, and got the message, in really bad English: “Multiple posts from the last year didn’t follow our standards.”

Bad English, as it wasn’t clear, “from the last year”? You mean the last year 2020 or the year to today?

No button to click to ask for an explanation, which posts? which standards? In my 11 active years as a Facebook user, I have never been blocked nor suspended. In all my decades as a journalist, not one of my articles was blocked by the publisher, nor was I asked not to write a particular piece.

WHAT will they think of next?

The gall of this phantom entity that calls itself the “Ateneo Martial Law Museum” to claim that TV host Toni Gonzaga was not doing her job for not interrogating Ferdinand Marcos Jr. fiercely enough in her one-on-one interview with him.

In the first place, the “open letter” was unsigned, a sure sign that the author does not have the balls to be identified and is hiding behind this entity that carries the lofty name of Ateneo.

Those who set up this entity and named it such are either ignorant of the term “museum” or are devious propagandists. For Christ’s sake, check any dictionary, and it will tell you a museum is “a building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic or cultural interest are stored and exhibited.”

Britannica even emphasizes: “The museum differs markedly from the library, with which it has often been compared, for the items housed in a museum are mainly unique and constitute the raw material of study and research.” An entire library can be demolished and its books converted to a digital library. This can’t be done for a museum.

AT least, thank God, this kind of Yellow black propaganda blitz didn't last too long, to be exact just 23 days after Sen. Franklin Drilon fired the first salvo, bannered on the…

THE World Trade Center attack that occurred 20 years ago, commemorated on Thursday in the US, still stands as the worst act of terrorism ever, with 3,000, mostly New Yorkers, killed.…

WHAT’s happening? We, like most of the world, are in the midst of a surge in Covid-19 infections – in effect the third wave of the pandemic that started in March 2020 and worse than the first two. Even the world’s richest nations with massive vaccinations undertaken are being hit. For example, the US, with 54 percent of its population already vaccinated, still had cases the other day of 122,212 per 1 million people compared to our 18,898.

The third wave has particularly hit badly nearly all Asian countries; even those (like Vietnam and Malaysia) that had seemed to have the pandemic under control last year. Japan, for instance, has posted 12,469 cases per 1 million population.

What happened? As all organisms are wont to do because of their imperative to survive, Covid-19 mutated into what is called the Delta variant (in the epidemiologists’ Greek-letter nomenclature). The variant was first detected in India in March. Probably since the virus had infected numerous people (33 million) in that country, it gave it a huge number of bodies in which to evolve.

Delta is now the most dominant strain responsible for infections worldwide. The World Health Organization reported that its genome sequencing showed 70 percent of infections here are by Delta.

NOT a few US newspapers after the fall of Afghanistan reported information that made Americans grimace: the US war cost its taxpayers an astounding $2.3 trillion.

But there’s an even more shocking figure that is hardly reported: The US spent $6.4 trillion* in the wars it undertook after the 9/11 attack on the New York World Trade Center that took 3,000 lives, mostly American lives.

These wars were either the most horrible, bloody and expensive revenge campaign in history or the costliest manhunt for its admitted perpetrators, the Saudi Osama bin Laden and his gang.

These wars demonstrated how the Americans’ expertise in propaganda packaged these conflicts as noble crusades as the “War on Terror” overall, but even for each country.

TO be sure, the government must answer point by point the politicking senators’ allegations of corruption at the Health and Budget departments.

This is especially so as its quite obvious that whether these are true or not, these are obviously part of an all-out campaign recently launched by the Yellows and their newfound allies (like Senators Richard “Dick” Gordon and Panfilo “Ping” Lacson, I would think) to throw dirt at President Rodrigo Duterte to prevent a Duterte 2.0 administration very likely 10 months from now.

It is a despicable campaign: we’re in the middle of the battle against Covid-19, yet the likes of Gordon and Franklin Drilon want to grill the officials – the Department of Health – leading our fight.

It’s not the time to do that, dear senators, not now. The documents won’t be lost and those people you are accusing are certainly not the type to flee overseas as Lacson did in 2010 just before an arrest warrant was issued against him.

SEN. Emmanuel “Manny” Pacquiao recently declared that if he becomes president, we won’t see squatters in the country in four to five years. He said: “All of them will have their own homes or condominiums or subdivisions. They won’t pay for these, even for one peso.”

At least early in the political season Pacquiao has already revealed: 1) he is in the mold of the traditional politicians we’ve hated, those who’d promise people the moon just to get elected; 2) he is either intellectually lazy or just plain stupid; and 3) he is politically vacuous.

He’s the first announced presidential candidate to promise such a big thing. But we all hear these sickening promises every election… I promise this, I promise that, that it has become a favorite topic for editorial cartoons.

Can’t Pacquiao or his handlers be more innovative? But, then, what do you expect of Sen. Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel 3rd, who is the antithesis of his father, in integrity and intellect.

AS I tried to fathom the colossal blunder of the world’s mightiest superpower, the United States, in its ignominious defeat by the Taliban, I realized it was another testament to that old, nay, ancient, adage: Actions have consequences, always.

A truism that may sound but read on; the adage applies not just to nations, but also to individuals. It could be the most important principle you may want to remember in your life.

On April 14, President Joe Biden announced that US troops would start leaving Afghanistan in May, the withdrawal to be completed, for dramatic impact, on Sept. 11, on the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks that prompted the invasion of that country two decades ago. The Biden government would later make the excuse that it was Donald Trump who had committed to the policy in his last year in office – which Trump defense officials are now claiming to be a ruse in the negotiations. Biden probably thought he couldn’t let his predecessor go down in history as the peacemaker and not him.

Biden’s announcement had terrible consequences, although it is unclear whether he had ignored the advice of his security team or that perhaps even the Pentagon had grown tired of what Biden called the “forever war.”

The biggest mistake not only in such military actions, but in other major actions, is ignoring the reality that these are not undertaken in a vacuum. There are other players in the “game” who obviously have all the liberty to react as they please.

I COULDN’T believe what a columnist here wrote that Sweden’s performance in addressing the pandemic – no lockdowns, no health and social protocols – was “salutary.” He even, comically I think, pats himself at the back that he is the “heretic” that has been proven right in espousing the Swedish model in dealing with the pandemic.

Is he nuts? Sweden has been one of the worst-hit countries in the world. Its herd-immunity belief, that the virus will go away after much of the population are infected and would have developed natural immunity has been totally proven wrong. In a rare public appearance. the Swedish King Carl 16th Gustaf said several months ago: “I think we have failed. We have a large number who have died, and that is terrible.”

A huge 11 percent, 1.1 million, of Sweden’s population were Covid-19 infected, among the highest rates in the world. In our case only 1.7 percent got sick of the virus. Some 14,634 of Swedes died from Covid, much more than the 8,793 killed in Metro Manila whose 13.5 million population is bigger than Sweden’s 10.1 million. Sweden is the stark outlier among four Scandinavian countries (see accompanying table), with the other three having cases at most of 340,567 (for Denmark).

If those Swedish rates of cases and deaths per population, the result of their it-will-just-go-away-stance, were converted to our population of 111.2 million, there would have been 12.2 million Filipinos infected, more than seven times the actual figure now of 1.9 million infected.