PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s Executive Order (EO) 49 designating as his economic czar or “super secretary,” Frederick Go of the Gokongwei conglomerate, tasked to supervise all economic departments was unprecedented, a first for any president.

I suspect that a year and half in office, Marcos has realized how enormous the tasks of the Philippine presidency are, that he’s decided to turn over all work on the economic front to a special assistant, with a secretary rank.

Go will also have to deal with the “intrigues” (as we term it in Filipino) that will be thrown at him by officials who do not like the new setup.

I know from where I speak. I was President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s Presidential Chief of Staff for two years. Even if the job had little authority — and no “signing authority” — I was perceived as cutting off certain officials’ line to the then-president that there was a torrent of rumors thrown at me and my office.

HAS the world gone mad?

Since October 7, in retaliation against the murder of 1,200 Israelis by the Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), the Israel Defense Forces has bombed almost every day, civilian buildings, hospitals and even convoys bringing food and medicine to Gaza. The latest estimate by Gaza’s health ministry is 20,000 Palestinians, 8,000 children, killed through US-made and US-financed bombs. The United Nations has estimated that 500,000 civilians — again mostly children — are starving, most surviving through water.

Most people don’t really bother to think about what really is a central feature of their lives: their religion, their belief in a Deity. This is remarkable in that it is religion which tells us what would happen – or think would happen —  after the few decades of our existence. Doesn’t that make religion – our religion—an important thing to think about to study?  Ordinary people of course don’t have the leisure to do this.

But science through the  academe in the past several decades have made religion a field of study using  the same scientific method, and putting aside faith and superstitution,  that it has used to study the natural world,  resulting in the discovery of the universes’ “secrets”, thing such as DNA, sub-atomic particles and origins of the cosmos.

The result of these studies on religion though will trouble the Christian faithful.

The first wave of the unravelling of religion has been through books, published from 2005 to 2009 by the so-called “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism”: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins  (The God Delusion, 2006) , neuroscientist Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2005), cognitive scientist Daniel Dennet (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 2006),  columnist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007). These four have made such a systematic, comprehensive debunking of religion – demonstrated incontrovertibly to be a relic of mankind’s infantile period – that these books are said to have ushered in the era of atheism.

After these overall philosophical and logical critique of religion has been the attack on Christianity itself, ironically undertaken  by religious scholars of that religion.  

TERESITA Sy-Coson, the country’s richest billionaire and matriarch of SM, the Philippines’ biggest conglomerate, last week stunned the little brown American military brass and noisy Coast Guard when she said:

“China is very close to us; we cannot be too antagonistic,” Sy-Coson, the SM Investments Corp. vice chairperson, told reporters last Wednesday. “Even though we know what is happening, I guess we have to do it through a more peaceful negotiation,” she added.

NOTHING reveals the hypocrisy of the Senate in defending Philippine sovereignty and maritime rights in the South China Sea than its construction starting in 2019 of its offices at the…

ON December 15 several Philippine mainstream media outlets screamed similar front-page headlines — which were fake news. These were obviously spread to keep up the tensions triggered two days earlier by the Philippine Coast Guard when, with boats that it had hired, it entered Ayungin Shoal (Ren’ai Dao), which China considers as part of its Nansha archipelago, without permission — and were water-cannoned away.

“Sino vessels at Ayungin seen in ‘invasion’ mode,” the Philippine Daily Inquirer banner story screamed. “Chinese ships enter Ayungin,” was The Manila Times‘ howling banner headline. The US Naval Institute website had the same “story”: “Chinese Maritime Militia vessels swarmed within and around Second Thomas Shoal this week in Beijing’s latest move against the Philippines in the South China Sea.”

IT is certainly tempting, indeed accurate, to say that the two House committees' ordering two of our contemporary heroes — bold anti-communist crusaders former Presidential Communications undersecretary Lorraine Badoy and…

THE United States, which incessantly boasts that it is the world guardian of the “rules-based international order,” passed a law in August 2002 warning the International Criminal Court (ICC) that it would invade its headquarters at The Hague or any of its facilities anywhere in order to forcibly free any American citizen the court arrests and detains.

Because of this, the law, while officially known as the American Service Members’ Protection Act, is colloquially called the “Hague Invasion Act.” The law’s provisions practically threaten to outlaw the ICC if it were to investigate any American. The Act has been codified as Subchapter II of Chapter 81 of Title 22, United States Code, making it one of the general laws of the US.

Among the many provisions of the law are its prohibition on the extradition of any American from the US or from any other country to the ICC; the banning of ICC officials from conducting investigations in the US; and the barring of any government agency, including the courts, from cooperating with the ICC.

The US claimed that its main reason for hostility toward the ICC is that the Rome Statute violates its Constitution, which provides that crimes committed on American soil can be tried only by US courts. The US also claimed that the ICC cannot prosecute members of its armed forces as well as its high officials for military acts authorized by the US Congress or by the president.

Three months before the invade-the-Hague law was passed, President George W. Bush’s administration formally informed the United Nation secretary-general that it was rejecting the Rome Statute and the ICC.