EACH year since Benigno Aquino 3rd stepped down from power, the commemoration of his father’s death is becoming more and more pathetic, with the crowd the other day at Ninoy’s tomb not even reaching a hundred.

This holiday really should be canceled, if only to spare Ninoy and his family the storm of insults — e.g., “Happy traitor’s day,” “Ninoy died. So what?” — he gets in social media every August 21.

What demonstrated this year that the Yellow Cult is all but extinct is that no high Liberal Party leader and others who profited from Noynoy’s rule were there: no Franklin Drilon, no Francis Pangilinan, no Edsel Lagman, no Risa Hontiveros. Antonio Trillanes 4th, a Nacionalista was there, to his credit, in gratitude to the Yellows for making him, a bungling coup leader, a senator for 12 years.

TODAY is a special non-working holiday, officially “Ninoy Aquino Day” as decreed by Republic Act 9256, signed into law in February 2004 by President Arroyo, when Speaker Jose de Venecia and Senate President Franklin Drilon headed Congress.

Curiously, the proclamation did not call Aquino a “hero,” nor did it explain why a holiday was being declared in his name. The terse six-paragraph text merely said it was a holiday “in order to commemorate the death anniversary of former senator Benigno “Ninoy” S. Aquino Jr.” That he is a hero is an interpretation from the fact that only two other persons have holidays declared in their honor, Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, who were declared heroes in the same legislation that enacted their holidays.

Peruse the following facts and decide for yourself if you think Aquino is a national hero.

SOCIAL media was abuzz in the past several days, with netizens cheering on as Krizette Laureta Chu, an ordinary but very active and audacious blogger, take on — and shame — the leftist Bayan Muna leader Teodoro Casiño, a three-term party-list congressman, for threatening her with a libel suit.

Casiño claimed that Chu’s posting of a photo in her timeline (that went viral) of him and his son (his face blocked out of course) in a La Salle school activity was a violation of their right to privacy.

Chu had posted the photo to show the hypocrisy of the Left who recruit — brainwash, really — students from schools that cater mostly to the lower middle class to join the New People’s Army and die in some jungle, while their leaders like Casiño put their children in expensive schools like La Salle, cloistered from the real world.

READ on, and I guarantee you’ll be shocked and angry at the sanctimonious European and US NGOs and media’s lies about our country and its President.

A few weeks ago, Global Witness, a UK-based entity purportedly championing issues, came out with its 2018 report, published like an expensive magazine with dramatic color photographs and graphs, and melodramatically titled Enemies of the State.

It claimed that last year, with “30 environmentalists” killed by state forces, the Philippines was the “world’s deadliest country for defenders of their land or the environment.” Global Witness is mainly funded by ideological imperialists, the tycoons George Soros and Pierre Omidyar. The two, through North Base Media and Omidyar Network, have also have been the main foreign investors in the stridently anti-Duterte website rappler.com.

I FIND it astonishing that commentators with doctorates in political science who oppose the revival of mandatory college-based military training (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps or ROTC), miss one of the most important reasons why this is necessary.

This is the fact that one of the most essential features of sovereign states — the most important social organization in this stage of humanity’s history — is their military. There is no state that doesn’t have a military (except perhaps the Vatican). It’s a no-brainer that the strongest states in the world are those with the strongest military forces. Even the orthodox political science definition of a state is that it is the only entity within a defined territory which has the legitimate use of force — which the military and its cousin the police exercises.

A state’s military force does not just tell the world that its sovereignty is to be respected, thereby strengthening its citizens’ patriotism, and pride in it. Through military service, citizens of one country get to realize deep in their hearts and minds that they are members of a community called the nation-state, which is so important that they can be called to risk their life for it as soldiers. The ROTC is in fact the “lite” version of military conscription, the least demanding way of requiring a citizen to contribute to the nation. Continue reading

IT was indeed heart-wrenching to hear mothers tearfully relating at a Senate hearing, how their teenage daughters — for chrissake! daughters — abandoned their homes and schools as they were recruited to become full-time cadres of Anakbayan which, I will mince no words, is one of the fronts of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

To be honest, I am astonished at how the communists are still able to recruit students – by definition an educated, thinking sector – into their ranks, most likely to lose their lives for a useless cause, and be buried in unmarked graves in some jungle.

Maybe it’s self-serving, but in my time, there were so many things that would have easily convinced anyone to join the Communist Party. There was the global student movement against the “Establishment.” There was the Vietnam war which made “US imperialism” so real. Philippine elites were in deadly combat, so that two villages in the North were even ruthlessly burned to the ground because they didn’t vote for one gubernatorial candidate.

THE National Endowment For Democracy (NED), accused of being a venue for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) propaganda and destabilization operations in Eastern Europe and most recently in Hong Kong, has added another Internet news site here to its stable of such outfits critical of the Duterte regime.

In what is practically an up-yours message to Duterte, the internet news site is based in Davao City itself, and purportedly covers mainly Mindanao: MindaNews.com.

Just two years ago MindaNews was a bare-bones internet site with very little following. Especially this year, it has surged as a full-blown website, obviously patterned after another NED-financed outfit Rappler.com, after that controversial US funder gave it $70,000 (P4 million in 2017 and 2018), and reportedly another $35,000 for this year. MindaNews doesn’t disclose this very important information in its website.

THE National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-linked outfit, has been helping the opposition groups in Hong Kong that have been leading the massive demonstrations there in the past week, according to several accounts critical of the protest movement.

Yep, this is the same destabilizer now in Hong Kong, the NED, which has extended about P100 million in funds to vociferous anti-Duterte media outfits — the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Rappler, Vera Files and the Center for Media Freedom and Democracy.

None of these outfits have denied these reports since I reported* it first in 2017 and subsequently, nor have they explained how and why their conscience allows them to receive money from a foreign power, known to have controlled our nation in the past and strives to continue to do so.

PRESIDENT Duterte’s critics claim that his popularity and political acumen, as well as his allies’ overwhelming victory in the May elections, have made him so powerful that he is on the way to becoming an absolute ruler.

Yet in the case of the huge Coconut Industry Investment Fund-Oil Mills Group (CIIF-OMG), which just five years ago had revenues from its coconut oil milling operations of over P14 billion, its board of directors has managed to defy his orders.

A year ago, five of the group’s eight directors nearly got to stop the firm’s operations when they resigned and got all the key officers to go on mass leave, to protest Duterte’s nomination of a Davaoeño, one Rehan Lao. Duterte bent over backwards, and rescinded Lao’s appointment.

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LAWYERS Jose Manuel Diokno and Andre Palacios claimed they were counsels for 20 Palawan and Zambales fishermen when they filed a writ of kalikasan with the Supreme Court to compel government agencies to rehabilitate and protect the West Philippine Sea from “environmental damage due to poaching and other illegal activities being undertaken by Chinese nationals.”

It was all a lie, a total fraud. The fishermen, in very detailed sworn testimonies, said they knew nothing about such a suit, and were shocked when they read in the newspapers or were told by their neighbors that they were involved in the high-profile case suing the government.

Diokno and his accomplices are guilty of claiming in a court of law to represent people who did not authorize them to do so. What Diokno and his gang did is a patent violation of Section 27 of the Rules of Court No. 138, punishable by disbarment: “A member of the bar may be removed or suspended from his office as attorney by the Supreme Court for…for willfully appearing as an attorney for a party to a case without authority to do so.”