INDEED this often happens after a crime, when the gang members disagree among themselves, and they end up ratting on each other.

His shiny ego pricked by former Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio’s thinly veiled criticism of him in his July 1, 2021 Philippine Daily Inquirer column, that he purportedly tried to block the filing of the arbitration case against China,  former Solicitor General Florin Hilbay immediately hit back at Carpio the following day. 

Inadvertently, he disclosed the real goal of the arbitration: To remove the Chinese blocking of certain oligarchs’ natural-gasextraction project in the disputed Reed Bank.

In a self-congratulatory, five-page document he posted in his Facebook wall, Hilbay revealed what I have been claiming in several past columns.  It wasn’t patriotism that drove former foreign secretary Albert del Rosario and Carpio to propose and undertake vigorously the arbitration suit against China.

YES, it’s a bogus degree, at least based on the information so far available, unless Sen. Manuel Pacquiao and the University of Makati (UMak) that issued his degree explain otherwise.

In December 2019, Pacquiao was awarded by the UMak a bachelor of science degree in political science, after a year’s study (not three months) at that institution. UMak’s president at the time was Abigail Binay, also Makati’s mayor, after its longtime president Tomas Lopez passed away in February 2019.

UMak, however, is not authorized to issue the kind of bachelor’s degree that was given to the senator.

Under existing laws on education, the only way to skirt the four-year course (four years, because it humanly takes that long to complete the 120 to 130 college units required) for a bachelor’s degree is through the so-called Expanded Tertiary Education Equivalency and Accreditation Program (ETEEAP).

Last of 3 parts

THE late Benigno Aquino 3rd’s predecessors all made huge errors and even committed crimes against the nation. But Aquino’s were so incontrovertible and even horrible that his thank-you-Noynoy fawners do not even bother to contest most of these allegations.

What I find so despicable is that several of these crimes were disguised as noble projects, which Aquino and his cabal managed to get the media, the Church and Congress to support.

Journalism, as they say, is a rough draft of history. I am presenting my draft, and I dare the Yellows to contest this, and I commit to presenting their responses in this space.

These crimes and hoaxes, just one of which would be enough for history to condemn Aquino, are as follows.

Second of 3 parts

“THOSE that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” the British statesman Winston Churchill wrote in his variation of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s famous repeating-the-past aphorism. Former president Benigno Aquino 3rd’s death is an occasion for us to learn from history.

What made up for Aquino’s lack of qualifications for the presidency, created the illusion that he was a good president and which covered up for his crimes and hoaxes were four attributes of his presidency. These, however, were seriously detrimental to us as a nation.

First, Aquino had a tight hold on media, whose influence on people’s minds was even stronger than during Marcos’ strongman rule because of its expertise in clothing lies as truths.

This was not because this media believed in Aquino, but because they not only were owned by oligarchs who saw Aquino as their own but were managed by Yellow cultists who saw him as the son of their saint, whom they had the sacred duty to protect.

First of 2 parts THE huge lesson for the nation of the Benigno Aquino 3rd presidency is the following: A political force should never ever be so greedy for power…

THAT club of megalomaniacs called 1Sambayan was the town’s laughingstock last week. They used our country’s sacred Independence Day to pontificate on the kind of president and vice president they would like, based on their fictional world.

They named six nominees for the presidency. Four rushed in an hour’s time to decline the nomination; Mary Grace Poe – who placed third in the 2016 elections – just minutes after that pathetic group made their announcement. Nominee Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo didn’t say whether she accepted the nomination or not but in her usual way, blah-blahed inanities about the need for us to unite.

Only the super-megalomaniac of them all, the bungling putschist Antonio Trillanes 4th, accepted the club’s nomination. I bet 1Sambayan convenor, the Aquino regimes’ blundering, foreign secretary Albert del Rosario will be squirming in his seat when his club meets with Trillanes on the nomination.

Trillanes had accused del Rosario of treason in his handling of the Scarborough Shoal fiasco, even telling me in an interview that he should be shot by firing squad. Trillanes claimed that del Rosario had even spread fake news during that crisis to worsen the country’s quarrel with China – such as releasing to the Philippine Daily Inquirer an old 1990s photo of Chinese navy men planting their flag on the shoal, to stoke Filipinos’ anger against China.

1Sambayan doesn’t even deserve to be called an opposition group: Without media, nobody would pay any notice to this group of delusional retired men (and women) and clerics still brainwashed by passé liberation theology rhetoric, none of whom could even win a post as barangay chairman. Worse, with their misdeeds against the country. they don’t have any right at all to open their mouth about where our nation should be going.

OF course, the book doesn’t say so directly.

But if boxing legend Sen. Manny Pacquiao reads Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing, he would be convinced without an ounce of doubt of the stark reality of the career that has brought him fame and fortune beyond his wildest dreams.

Damage, written by renowned boxing journalist Tris Dixon and released last month, reveals in vivid detail and through scientific studies professional boxers such as Pacquiao have a very high chance of suffering brain damage not just from his 71 official fights but in his thousands of sparring sessions to prepare for his bouts.

By winning public office, especially the presidency, Pacquiao will be putting his country at risk of having an official unable to undertake his functions because of brain shrinkage and degeneration, the scientific term for which is chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), referred to before in boxing reportage through the pejorative term “punch-drunk” and later “dementia pugilista.”

ONCE in a while, truth is suddenly revealed much like a bolt of lightning in an instant reveals a landscape in a dark night.

This is exactly what happened recently when a report in the internet version of the once-oligarch, Lopez-owned ABS-CBN media outfit showed to a sickening extent its reporters’ coddling of the communist New People’s Army (NPA).

On June 6, the Philippine National Police issued a press statement that the rising football star Kieth Absalon was killed, together with his cousin, by an NPA anti-personnel land mine in Masbate as they were riding on their bicycles. Most newspapers and the state-run Philippine News Agency ran news stories with roughly the same headline: “FEU booter, cousin killed in NPA mine blast.”

But not the abs-cbn.com. Its headline, based on the same PNP press statement was: “Up-and-coming footballer Kieth Absalon passes away at 21.” It definitely wasn’t merely a case of a writer misusing a term “pass away,” which is mostly used for deaths due to natural causes.

DISREGARDING international conventions and practice, President Benigno Aquino 3rd in 2012, on his own, renamed as the “West Philippine Sea” a segment of the South China Sea. It is a term that would hobble our efforts to settle our sovereignty and maritime-claim disputes with China and Vietnam.

The South China Sea name was given by Europeans starting in the 16th century and recognized over the centuries as such by the world’s nations. It is defined precisely through geographic coordinates by the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), governing body for the naming of bodies of water around the world. China calls it internally as the “South Sea” while Vietnam calls it the “East Sea.”

Aquino through Administrative Order 29 of 2012 named as “WPS” or West Philippine Sea, “the western side of the Philippine archipelago the Luzon Sea as well as the waters around, within and adjacent to the Kalayaan Island Group and Bajo de Masinloc, also known as Scarborough Shoal.”

Aquino ordered the entire government to use the term “West Philippine Sea;” thus, the term has come to be used by everyone, from as high an official as President Duterte to the lowliest public employee.

RATHER than spending in the past few months an alleged P50 million for PR people and political operators to push his bid for the presidency (or the vice presidency), legendary boxing champion Manny Pacquiao should instead have used that money to finance the purchase of vaccines that the nation urgently needs to end this scourge, and become a national hero of our time.

I am not talking about the whole nation. He could just choose where he was born, Bukidnon, or where he grew up, Sarangani, as his “target” for getting as many of its adult population as possible vaccinated. With government finances stretched to its limit after a year and a half of addressing the pandemic, I’m sure the Duterte government can come up with an arrangement for using Pacquiao’s money to buy more vaccines and get these into the arms of Filipinos.

And why am I picking on Pacquiao to do this? Well, firstly, he has portrayed himself as not just a prizefighter, but one who wants to serve the people. He certainly has the capacity to do so, being the world’s richest boxer (after Floyd Mayweather and George Foreman) with a net worth of P10 billion.

And secondly, I was shocked by reports — unverified of course unless Pacquiao himself confirms it — in the past two months, he has spent (wasted I think) P50 million to contract PR and political operators as well as get the purported support of some politicians, to launch his bid for the presidency, or to get Duterte to choose him as a candidate for that post or the vice presidency.

If he had used this P50 million to help the government buy vaccines, he could have demonstrated he is sincere about serving the people, especially at this time of one of the country’s worst crises. He could even use his prestige in America – where he is said to be loved more than the American, the arrogant Mayweather – to get US vaccine makers to sell vaccines to him. He could even package his scheduled fight with Errol Spence Jr. in August, as one whose proceeds he would donate to buy vaccines — Pacquiao’s “jab for jabs.”