IT looks like the Covid-19 pandemic will be like the February 1918 to April 1920 flu pandemic (the deadliest in the modern era), at least in its two-year duration, with its two waves, the last occurring just when the world thought it was over. Let’s brace for it, and hope it goes away by the latest by March 2022, two years after it emerged here.

Mask-wearing and the other precautions will still have to be suffered. That or die in the horrible feeling you’d have, as victims have reported, when you drown – gasping for air.

At least Covid-19 has taken only – pardon that adverb – 4.2 million lives globally and 28,000 here. The 1918 to 1920 pandemic killed at least 50 million worldwide; 80,000 in the Philippines.

We have one thing going for us though that humanity didn’t have during that 1918 plague: the exponential rise of science, in humanity’s knowledge of nature, which made possible the amazing formulation and mass production of at least six major vaccines, each of a different type. The science of microbiology and epidemiology, in fact, had been given a rocket booster because of the 1918 epidemic as the US and the West poured in vast resources scrambling in panic to find an effective vaccine against that flu, which, however, was discovered only in 1945.

An amazing but hardly quoted measure for humongous increase in scientific knowledge in a matter of several decades is the number of articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, which totaled, believe it or not, to 2.6 million in a single year alone, 2018. How many in the 1920s? Fifty thousand.

I HAVE pointed out several times before that the Social Weather Stations (SWS) is one of the most nefarious propaganda tools of the ruling class. It did so again recently, serving the needs of the oligarchic triad desperate to continue pressuring China to allow it to extract gas in the Reed Bank, which Vietnam and China also claim.

Misinforming its respondents on what the arbitration ruling was, the SWS claimed in its June 2021 poll that Filipinos “clearly favor stronger action to assert the country’s right in the West Philippine Sea as per the 2016 decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA).” But its poll questions, as I discuss below, present fallacies that could only have led to that result.

The poll was funded by the Stratbase ADR Institute, financed by former Foreign Affairs secretary Albert del Rosario, who pushed for the filing of the arbitration case with China in 2013. Del Rosario’s wealth – and he makes at least P200 million a year – has mainly come from his directorships in the firms of First Pacific Co., which led the triad whose gas-extraction project in the Reed Bank was blocked by China in 2011.

SWS does legitimate surveys that reflect public opinion when the questions are not ambiguous and are clear-cut such as who would the respondent vote for or if he is satisfied or not with the president’s and other officials’ performance.

It uses its reputation acquired in doing such legitimate surveys as cover for its polls the intention of which is merely to support propaganda offensives its clients pay it to do.

EXCEPT for the stragglers of the dying Yellow cult, I don’t think there’s any doubt that most people think that Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency has been successful. This is despite the worst natural disaster ever to have hit the country, the Covid-19 pandemic that has brought to their knees even the most developed countries in the world, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and even Germany.

“Successful” is even an understatement since Duterte has undertaken, as I have discussed last Wednesday, seven breakthroughs that will change the trajectory of our nation. These are his furious wars against the communist insurgency and illegal drugs; his efforts to weaken the exploitative Philippine oligarchy personified by the Lopez clan as well as these oligarchs’ (and mini-oligarchs, like the Philippine Daily Inquirer owners) weapon, their media outfits; his ending our vassalage to the US; his drive to finally build, what should have been built since our independence, modern infrastructure; and last, his bold resistance to the most elaborate scam ever foisted on the nation, the arbitration suit against China that was the project of a triad of oligarchs.

The masses have felt Duterte’s accomplishments, reflected in his record ratings by pollsters. Pulse Asia’s last survey gave him a 91 percent rating, the Social Weather Stations 72 percent. Compare these to the late President Benigno Aquino 3rd’s ratings at the start of his last year in office: 38 percent in PulseAsia’s poll and 32 percent in SWS.

It is easy to understand why Aquino’s political support plunged in the last phase of his presidency, while that of Duterte has remained at its high levels.

When Aquino delivered his last SONA in 2015, his presidency had already been condemned by most people because of his hijacking of the budget in 2011 through the so-called Disbursement Acceleration Program to bribe the Congress to remove the chief justice of the Supreme Court for the sake of his clan’s Hacienda Luisita, his government’s bungling in 2013 of the disaster and relief operations following the Yolanda super typhoon disaster that killed over 6,000 Filipino, and the Mamasapano massacre in 2015 of 44 elite police commandos because he refused to order his troops to rescue them.

IN his five years in office, President Duterte has changed the course of Philippine history, although his breakthroughs conceivably can still be reversed if there is no Duterte 2.0.

First, he has all but routed the communist insurgency. Duterte is the first president to undertake an all-out drive to end this scourge after 40 years, since Marcos’ in the early 1970s.

Except for Duterte, all the five presidents immediately preceding him shirked in fighting the communists either because they were plain naïve (as Corazon “Cory” Aquino was) or were political opportunists that they couldn’t risk losing the support of the Left and its many allies.

Cory even strengthened the communists, releasing, as soon as she grabbed power, its top leader and tactician par excellence, Jose Ma. Sison, whom Marcos had arrested in 1977. Cory even romanticized them as freedom fighters and undertook “peace talks” with them, which was nothing but the vast “democratic space” they used to expand their ranks. Cory got the Constitutional Commission she commanded to create the so-called party-list system, which the communists expertly maneuvered both to become major participants in Congress and to raise funds for their New People’s Army.

Never before has there been a broad “National Task Force to End Local Communist Conflict” that has fought the communists in all fields – from propaganda to economic development of communities organizing the insurgents’ victims to the battlefield.

THE Philippine media is going to the dogs. Colonial mentality and stenographic journalism among our media people have become worse, afflicting not just the new generation but even the old.

I borrow that 1960s term “colonial mentality” to refer to many Filipino journalists’ mindset that if a US, European or even Japanese news outlet reports something, then it’s true beyond contention.

Some columnists even revere articles from The New York Times or the Washington Post as if they are scripture; even cutting and pasting them at length in their pieces. Have they forgotten the fact that these two newspapers, and nearly all of Western mainstream media, swallowed hook, line and sinker, and disseminated the biggest lie of this century that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and, therefore, deserved to be invaded, which cost the lives of 1 million Iraqis?

A recent example of this colonial mentality was the uncritical embrace of the New York-based Bloomberg’s report several weeks ago that ranked the Philippines second to the last in “resiliency” to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Your usual Yellow papers, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and The Philippine Star, of course, reported it with glee, with not a single critical sentence, such as: “This contradicts data that the Philippines has only 13,888 cases per 1 million population and 67 deaths per 1 million compared to the United States’ 24,941 and 1,882, respectively, and that in the Johns Hopkins and Worldometers listing of countries with their Covid statistic, there are 22 other countries much worse than us.

THERE is one phrase familiar to media people, but which laymen probably have never heard of: “For the funds of it.” I first heard the phrase used at the National Press Club elections long ago, but it actually refers mostly to elections for government posts.

A twist on the more familiar “for the fun of it,” it points to one of the main reasons – other than megalomania – why so many seem to want to run for Philippine electoral posts, even for national posts. It’s an income-generating project.

This column of course was not inspired by the announcement the other day by Senators Panfilo Lacson and Vicente Sotto 3rd of their “firm” decision to run for president and vice president, respectively, in the elections next year.

The phrase describes the strange phenomenon in Philippine elections in which candidates, except for the very rich, end up richer after an election, whether they win or lose. It happens in the following way.

Politicians and government officials in the course of their careers develop friends – okay, let’s call a spade a spade, “clients” – among businessmen and the rich, which they help one way or another because of their political clout or even control over some government office.

FOR all the previous Aquino 3rd administration’s fixation (or pretended concern) over Philippine sovereign rights in the South China Sea, as defined by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), it didn’t bother with actually producing an official map that shows the breadth of both our territorial sea and its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Officially therefore, we still can’t claim where our maritime zones (EEZ and territorial sea) begin and end.

This only confirms my thesis that the Aquino regime and the likes of his foreign secretary Albert del Rosario and foremost Sinophobe Antonio Carpio weren’t really concerned about our nation’s sovereignty and sovereign rights. Carpio’s maps, as well as those presented by the Philippines in the arbitration suit, are therefore spurious in that they are not official maps.

The arbitration they forced on China was really intended to pressure it to agree to – as the then solicitor-general Florin Hilbay only recently confirmed – a joint development for gas and oil extraction in the Reed Bank between the Chinese firm and First Pacific Co. in which, not coincidentally, del Rosario has been an officer for decades.

The US enthusiastically supported the suit against China as it demonized its rival superpower as an expansionist power in the South China Sea. The arbitral panel also ruled that practically most of that sea are international waters, with just islets and rocks entitled only to tiny 12-nautical mile territorial seas – allowing US warships, conventional or nuclear, to roam there as they please, without the need to announce their presence.

PETER Anthony Abaya, the bro-ther of the late former president Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino 3rd’s transport and communications secretary Joseph Abaya, should explain his role in transforming the small tech firm Simularity Inc. into a clever generator of fake news against China in its territorial dispute with the Philippines. This is important to us as a nation, as I hope everyone will realize after reading this column.

The tiny Florida-based tech company, Simularity, in the past week, had gone on a campaign to claim that Chinese vessels were heavily polluting the Union Banks area in the Spratlys with what it outrightly referred to – in its supposed scientific paper – as “poop” and “shit.”

The firm cleverly got to spread its fake news through gullible media, notably GMA 7 and Channel 5’s “OneNews,” by posting together with its supposedly objective but questionable analysis a photograph taken from a low-flying airplane of a ship with a brownish trail anyone would conclude, because of the report’s headline, as human waste discharged by the vessel.

The photo, however, was immediately tracked down by an alert netizen as one appearing in Australia’s Daily Mail in 2014 in the Great Barrier Reef in Cairns. The unidentified ship wasn’t even discharging waste. It was undertaking dredging operations with the brown material being the usual sediments at the sea’s bottom.

A RANKING official of the past Benigno Aquino 3rd regime is behind the Florida-based Simularity Corp., which has been disseminating black propaganda, though in a very devious manner, against China over its activities in the South China Sea.

The firm, one source claimed, had been contracted by the US State Department to set up a “South China Sea Rapid Alert Forum,” its platform for manufacturing anti-China propaganda using its interpretations of satellite images.

The former Aquino official is Peter Anthony Abaya, the brother of Aquino’s former transportation and communications secretary, Joseph Abaya. Simularity Vice President Peter Konig confirmed in an email that Abaya is a director of the firm.

Abaya’s last posting in the previous government was as general manager of the National Reclamation Authority. He was an undersecretary of the energy department, sources claimed, when the First Pacific-led triad of oligarchs started to lobby the government to allow it to explore and extract gas from the Reed Bank, which China and Vietnam also claim.

REMEMBER George W. Bush’s hysterical claim in 2003 that Iraq had horrible “weapons of mass destruction” – WMDs, deadly chemical and biological weapons that could kill millions – which the US and its allies used as an excuse to invade Iraq?

That was one of the most terrible crimes against humanity in our generation. It killed a million Iraqis and triggered the civil wars chaos that continues to this day in that country, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Yemen and in Libya.

Remember that even the supposedly best newspapers in the world swallowed hook, line and sinker that claim, probably the worst hoaxes ever foisted on humanity in the 21st century? That the New York Times, which a few of my colleagues think is the modern bible, profusely apologized that they were hoodwinked by Bush over WMD, that their coverage was so totally wrong? That an American Pulitzer Prize winner was found to have fabricated her articles on the WMD?

Reading US State Secretary Anthony Blinken’s statement yesterday – as his predecessor last year did – praising the 2016 arbitration “against China,” and making the totally unfounded claim that “China continues to coerce and intimidate Southeast Asian coastal states,” and how, except for a few, the political elite and media are praising it and still can’t see it as a sham, I can only conclude the following: