Hilarious disconnect with reality

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A NEW YouTube channel authored by a dubious outfit that calls itself “Asean Analytics” was recently launched as another of the US’ many propaganda venues against China, exploiting the superpower’s territorial and maritime-entitlement disputes with the Philippines to demonize it as an aggressor in the South China Sea.

Recently, it posted a video entitled “How modern the Philippine military:Enough to protect the West Philippine Sea.” However, “Asean Analytics” is a fake news outfit.

It does not have any connection at all with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but pretends to be so by using Asean’s name and logo, a trick to give it credibility. It says it “aims of promote Asean tourism and deliver information about the economy and development within the Asean and neighboring nations.” But it hasn’t posted its own videos on these topics.

It is really another of the many US propaganda venues to demonize China, and push the Philippines into being belligerent towards the superpower. By pretending to be an Asean unit it calculates that gullible writers will think it is a legitimate channel, and repeat in mainstream media its misinformation. It also confuses readers into thinking that Asean supports the Philippines’ hostile stance against China over the two countries’ territorial and maritime-entitlement disputes in the South China Sea. (Asean hasn’t and has remained neutral over these issues.)

For instance, two of its recent videos are entitled “Oil and Gas Deposit in South China Sea China wants to control” and “PH Exclusive Economic Zone Controlled by China.” These claims are totally without basis. Most analysts have dismissed that 1970s idea that the South China Sea has huge commercial oil and gas deposits, and even if it has, it is expensive for China to extract it and transport it at least a thousand kilometers to the mainland. China’s hydrocarbon reserves are in its more accessible northwest areas (e.g., in Xinjiang) and these are equivalent to 5.4 times its annual consumption.

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What? Our annual spectacle of superstition declared a holiday?

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I’M convinced that we are a country so deeply infused in religious superstition of the worst kind spread by the Catholic Church that it is one reason for our underdevelopment.

There is no developed country in the world that has such an annual spectacle of superstition encouraged by the opportunistic Catholic Church, attended by hundreds of thousands of people, even 5 million in 2015.

I refer to the erroneously named “Feast of the Black Nazarene*,” a procession held every January 9, in which a purportedly miraculous 17th-century wooden image of Jesus Christ in kingly robes carrying the crucifix, which myth says was used to kill him, is brought from the Quirino Grandstand in Luneta (which the previous day had been brought without fanfare to that site for “devotees” to kiss its feet) to the Quiapo Church, its “home.”

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