WITH only a puny opposition less than a year to the 2022 elections, and a Duterte 2 administration inarguably on the horizon, the United States has employed what has been its special propaganda weapon, the Nobel Peace Prize, to give American-Filipino Maria Ressa, the chief executive officer (CEO) of a viciously anti-Duterte news website, the stature to demonize the Philippine president, and consequently whoever he endorses as his presidential candidate.

Ressa’s co-awardee is Dmitry Muratov, an editor of the most widely circulated newspaper in Russia very critical of Vladimir Putin, the four-term president of the Russian Federation, one of the two adversaries of the US for world dominance. The US must be so desperate it didn’t care that the motives of its Nobel move are so obvious: one is aimed against the strongman Putin, the other against the strongman Duterte, whom the Americans are furious at for drawing the country close to their second adversary, China. A Reuters headline on the story summed it up: “Journalists who took on Putin and Duterte win the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize” although it should have added the phrase “US targets” before “Putin.”

The US has demonstrated several times in the past its power to manipulate the Nobel awards committee into handing the peace prize to whomever it wants, when it needs to do so. The committee consists of just five people nominated by the Norwegian Parliament. If you’ve ever been in such a panel (as I have), you will realize how easy it would be for a determined party, such as the US, to manipulate the committee: it receives over 300 nominations for all awards per year. How did Russia get into the minds of these Norwegians? In terms of contributing to humanity, Julian Assange, who started Wikileaks, and Edward Snowden, who told the world of the massive US monitoring of private cell phone conversations, didn’t cross their minds. Oh, these two pissed off the US government.

The US has done this Nobel move before. To boost the profile of the first black US president, an obscure Illinois senator, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 2009 to Barack Obama just nine months into his term — even if he had done absolutely nothing to deserve the purported justification for it, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.” To draw attention to the imprisonment of a largely ignored Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, the peace prize was awarded solely to him in 2010.

Ressa was awarded not for any work of journalism but entirely on her portrayal of herself as a crusader for press freedom in the Philippines, which she claims President Rodrigo Duterte has been suppressing. She is a master of the sound bite, spewing such obvious lies that tug at Americans’ hearts such as her claim that for criticizing Duterte, she had received at one point “90 hate messages an hour, 90 rape threats per minute.”

TO be quite frank, I think the Pasig River Expressway (Parex) scheme, a P95-billion undertaking of government with the San Miguel Corp., to build a 19-kilometer elevated expressway along the banks of the Pasig River, is a stroke of genius, a brilliant out-of-the-box idea. It would run from the Radial Road 10 in Manila all the way to Taguig, with several exits along its course, including one to skyways leading to the NLEx and SLEx.

I should know. Many years back, I was with a study group that researched and brainstormed how the horrendous Metro Manila traffic that was costing the country at least P4 billion daily could be solved.

None of us thought of a highway along the Pasig River. This was probably because at the time, it was so polluted, its banks (especially along Pasay and Manila) sickeningly crowded both with the poorest squatters and big-business warehouses, that it seemed impossible to imagine these areas being cleared for decades.

THE latest PulseAsia survey on the May 22 national elections, and similar published and unpublished polls, very strongly point to the next administration being made up of any of these teams:

– President Sara Duterte-Carpio (24 percent in that poll) and vice president (VP) Rodrigo Duterte (14 percent for that post);

– President Sara and vice president Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (12 percent for VP in the poll);

– President Marcos (14 percent) and vice president Sara; and

– Either president Marcos or president Sara and vice president Duterte.

ONE of President Duterte’s historic legacies has been, as he put it, “to separate the Philippines from the US.” That is a bit of understatement: in so many words (and curses), Duterte has declared that the Philippines under his leadership is ending its decades-long puppetry to the US, and it will no longer be the American surrogate in Asia in that superpower’s campaign against China, as his predecessor scandalously was.

Locsin’s puppetry to the US was most recently demonstrated last week when he issued a shamelessly pro-American statement supporting the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (Aukus) Enhanced Trilateral Security Partnership, and its first major move, the US’ sale of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, the first ever turnover of such highly secret high-tech weapons system to a foreign country.

That sale sent shock waves around the globe, not only in Asia but in the world. It was the equivalent of China taking in Cuba to its alliance with Russia, and selling it its own nuclear submarines, so it could patrol the Caribbean.

The US propulsion technology is one of the “crown jewels of the American military” because it allows submarines to be stealthy when submerged and helps evade sonar detection,” the Financial Times reported. Nothing can prevent Australia from reverse-engineering the technology.

THE Yellows’ intense campaign last week to propagate their view that the martial law era was all black and that the strongman Ferdinand Marcos was the devil incarnate backfired on a nearly catastrophic scale.

I estimate some 300,000 comments deluged posts by Marcos bashers, among them the University of the Philippines’ (UP) “Dambana ng Gunita” series, Bam Aquino, and even the tiny opposition social club 1Sambayan’s “roundtable discussion on bridging generations.”

It was the equivalent of a people power uprising, this time against the Yellows, in cyberspace.

A similar show of force occurred in the 20-million-plus “unsubscribe” actions against Raffy Tulfo’s YouTube channel in retaliation against his declaration that he would bring ABS-CBN back when he wins as senator.

The DDS — diehard Duterte supporters, who are also all pro-Marcos — now control social media, a formidable force in the 2022 elections, especially considering that even by early next year, Covid-19 will likely still be with us, limiting in-person campaigning. Anybody who knows how social media and Facebook work would laugh at the Ressa or Hontiveros kind of allegations that President Rodrigo Duterte has a massive “troll farm.” Check out for yourself that Bam Aquino post described here and go over the comments — these come from ordinary people.

THE following is a chapter from my 2018 book, Debunked, which had 11 other chapters on the various aspects of martial law. Neither the Yellows nor any academic have questioned…

TO be quite honest, there was a moment of fear, nervous apprehension that an Orwellian Big Brother was monitoring my every post.

As melodramatic as that may sound, you’ll feel it, and be ashamed of yourself for feeling it, when, after such an innocent move as reposting an inspirational maxim (I think I was reposting a Krishnamurti quotation), you get a message as I did several days ago: “Account Restricted.

You can’t post or comment for 24 hours.” I clicked on the button “Why?”, and got the message, in really bad English: “Multiple posts from the last year didn’t follow our standards.”

Bad English, as it wasn’t clear, “from the last year”? You mean the last year 2020 or the year to today?

No button to click to ask for an explanation, which posts? which standards? In my 11 active years as a Facebook user, I have never been blocked nor suspended. In all my decades as a journalist, not one of my articles was blocked by the publisher, nor was I asked not to write a particular piece.

WHAT will they think of next?

The gall of this phantom entity that calls itself the “Ateneo Martial Law Museum” to claim that TV host Toni Gonzaga was not doing her job for not interrogating Ferdinand Marcos Jr. fiercely enough in her one-on-one interview with him.

In the first place, the “open letter” was unsigned, a sure sign that the author does not have the balls to be identified and is hiding behind this entity that carries the lofty name of Ateneo.

Those who set up this entity and named it such are either ignorant of the term “museum” or are devious propagandists. For Christ’s sake, check any dictionary, and it will tell you a museum is “a building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic or cultural interest are stored and exhibited.”

Britannica even emphasizes: “The museum differs markedly from the library, with which it has often been compared, for the items housed in a museum are mainly unique and constitute the raw material of study and research.” An entire library can be demolished and its books converted to a digital library. This can’t be done for a museum.

AT least, thank God, this kind of Yellow black propaganda blitz didn't last too long, to be exact just 23 days after Sen. Franklin Drilon fired the first salvo, bannered on the…