THERE are three crucial points President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. must keep in mind, or work for, in his meetings in China, especially with its President Xi Jinping. I didn’t pull these points out of thin air but are based on the intensive research I did in 2014-2016 that was the basis of my book, Debacle: The Aquino Regime’s Scarborough Fiasco and the South China Sea Arbitration Deception.*

First, forget — and bury 6 feet under — the silliness that is the 2016 arbitration ruling by a three-man panel, which the Aquino 3rd regime itself appointed. Six years after it was handed down, the world has forgotten about it. Except, of course, the US (with its usual minions), which after all maneuvered the witless President Aquino 3rd into filing the case, as a smokescreen for his colossal fiasco of losing Scarborough Shoal in the standoff with China in 2012 and in his naiveté that it would recover that lost territory.

WHAT an unlucky country we are. Going by the recent data and analysis of the World Bank, the term of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., in terms of the economy, would…

WHETHER he likes it or not, global events are developing to make the EDCA issue the first major test of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s leadership and wisdom. His very pro-American officials — ambassador to the US, second cousin Jose “Babe” Romualdez and Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo, and most of the Filipino elite — will likely urge him to uphold the EDCA, which of course could lead us into the two wars that the US could possibly be involved in, with China and Russia.

That position would be a very slippery slope putting us, in case even of a limited conflict, in the cross-hairs not just of China but Russia. Even without a war, Marcos’ acquiescence to US plans to activate EDCA would reverse his predecessor’s huge gains in drawing the country closer to its biggest trading partner, and perhaps even the biggest source of cheap official credit.

China can also play dirty when it thinks the US is making the country its puppet. In the 2012 Scarborough Shoal stand-off our banana exports to China suddenly had to be inspected for infestation — resulting in the rotting of thousands of dollars’ worth of shipments at Chinese ports.

Abalos at his show, with confessed gunman. I CAN'T believe how the police and Interior Secretary Benjamin Abalos Jr. has mishandled the killing of broadcaster Percival Mabasa ("Percy Lapid"). This…

I HAVE written two columns debunking the ruling of Manila Trial Court Judge Marlo Magdoza-Malagar that the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed group, the New People's Army,…

DEFINITELY. But of course I mean only as secretary of the Agriculture department, since after 100 days this has proven to be a very wrong move.

In June, days before he assumed office, Marcos said: “It’s important that the president take that portfolio not only to make it clear to everyone what high priority we put to the agricultural sector, but also as a practical matter, so that things move quickly.”

It turns out that the Agriculture department in practice has become his administration’s lowest priority, with the President, sources in that department say, having visited its headquarters only twice. The first was on July 4, his first and only meeting with the department’s executive committee. And the second, a week later, but to meet only with his representative Leocadio Sebastian (who was fired a month later) and a few directors.

IT is indeed an indication that the overall deterioration of Philippine journalism may have started to infect even a specialized section of it — opinion columns.

It was Philippine Star’s Jose Dalisay, a novelist and biographer who was supposed to be the newspaper’s replacement for the columns of the late F. Sionil Jose, who started this assault on opinion column-writing.

Obviously realizing he’s a fictionist all his life and not a column writer, Dalisay declared he was creating a new genre he calls “editorial fiction,” short fiction stories filling up his column space in that newspaper. That “genre” can exist only in lampoons, and only for student newspapers wanting to have some fun. Read his column, and you wouldn’t know and aren’t forewarned that what he writes is pure unadulterated fiction.