Recent Posts

First of 2 parts
PRESIDENT Duterte should forget about the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), and whether he should abrogate or charge the Americans for it. He should instead junk the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), the new form, and a much more cost-effective way for the United States to have its military bases back in the Philippines. EDCA was the end-product of the Yellows’ Sinophobia, which the US helped whip up to a frenzy that there was little resistance to it when it was instituted in 2014.

The VFA merely establishes the legal framework governing the US military when they are here for joint exercises with the Philippine military, which is allowed under the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951. For instance, the US marine convicted of murder and rape was imprisoned in a special military facility approved by the Americans and not in the national penitentiary, which the VFA allowed.

On the other hand, the EDCA practically restored US military basing in the Philippines, with the country’s five military camps to be used by Americans for prepositioning its war materiel and staging ground for its troops going to battle whenever the Americans say they need to do this. EDCA in effect allows the US a cheaper, as-needed military base in the Philippines.

SOME 684 people — mostly Reds, Pinks and Yellows — are listed as petitioners of 37 petitions asking the Supreme Court to rule as unconstitutional the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) of 2020. What do they think Supreme Court decisions are based on, the size of the mob, as was the case in EDSA 1 and 2?

They should heed the recent Supreme Court admonition over the previous Aquino 3rd regime’s ouster of the late Chief Justice Renato Corona, achieved largely through a massive propaganda campaign and the bribery of the Senate impeachment jurors: “The Filipino people live, toil and thrive in a democracy, but the rule of law should not stand parallel to the rule of the mob. Toe this line, and the nation may eventually behold the laws that the Courts have forever sworn to uphold, battered and bent.”

Not elected
Even if your mob increases to 6,840 or 68,400, it doesn’t matter to the Supreme Court. Why? Because the justices aren’t elected, and they don’t give a damn what you think of them. They don’t care, unlike a lot of politicians, especially in the Senate, if the Communist Party with its New People’s Army can give them a million, though at-the-point-of-a-gun, votes.

You can’t frighten them with death threats. Most of the Supreme Court judges — unlike the two appointed by President Aquino — have been criminal-court judges. This means they had been eating death threats for breakfast for years from merciless criminals you can’t even imagine.

THE defamation of the late former Chief Justice Renato Corona, as well as the Supreme Court, by a Yellow columnist in her piece the other day (“Misplaced compassion,” MT, Feb. 15, 2020) is one of the most sickening hatchet jobs I’ve read.

We columnists, by definition of our jobs, express our opinions. But we cannot disseminate disinformation, regurgitate allegations proven baseless years ago, and disguise these as our opinions. That kind of garbage should not have a place in a decent, fair newspaper.

The Supreme Court in its January 12 decision awarded Corona’s retirement benefits to his widow Cristina – four years after his death in 2014. The unanimous decision also practically vindicated Corona — who was judged by the Senate sitting as an impeachment court, guilty for filing an incomplete statement of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALN) — by declaring: “The SALN is a tool for public transparency, never a weapon for political vendetta.” 

It alluded to President Aquino 3^rd and his Yellow cult’s massive propaganda campaign against Corona in 2012 to remove him as chief justice: “The Filipino people live, toil, and thrive in a democracy, but the rule of law should not stand parallel to the rule of the mob.”

Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr., Southern Luzon Command chief and spokesman of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, is a hero. He is risking his life for the nation as the most powerful critic of the communist insurgency and he is starting to open the eyes of Filipinos to this grave threat to our nation’s stability, and even democratic ideals.

There hasn’t really been anybody — except for President Duterte — who has been so bold as to openly challenge the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and expose it as now the gravest threat to the nation, and reveal to the public its devious tricks and witting or unwitting mouthpieces.

General Parlade is a hero
Can you tell me if anybody, even during martial law (and except for President Ferdinand Marcos, that is) who has been as vocal as Parlade in openly battling the CPP?

Parlade knows of course that he is risking his life. Military men retire at 56, which is just a few years away for him. That means either Parlade would have to spend a fortune for bodyguards if the CPP, as is likely, were to “make a sample” of him, puts him in its version of a permanent fatwah or “enemies-of-the-people” list.

THE following article, written by a political scientist specializing in Asean and Chinese studies, Anna Rosario Malindog-Uy, was posted on the website Asean Post on February 17, with the title “Philippine-China Relations Under Siege.”

I took the liberty of deleting a few sentences so it would fit in this column’s space, and rearranged the topics she discussed to put first her discussion on the new Chinese law on its coast guard’s authority on the use of force. (FYI, the coast guard’s official name is “Chinese People’s Armed Police Force Coast Guard Corps.”) I didn’t add a single word to her article.

Former Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio recently wrote two frothing-at-the-mouth columns over this law, one of which claimed it has made the superpower “A grave threat to world peace.” The other was a brazenly sinophobic column titled “China unleashes another deadly virus,” which indicates he is a true believer of Trump and his ignorant, racist followers’ view that Covid-19 was a Chinese conspiracy against America, and that its new coast guard law “this time is a legal virus.” Not even mercenary communist propagandists have gone that low in throwing dirt at China. This demonstrates that Carpio’s writings on our disputes with China are obviously no longer springing from rationality, but, as the Filipino phrase would put it “Iba na.” I intend to find out why the vitriol, put up or not.

The Coast Guard issue is very well addressed in this piece by Malindog-Uy. I dare Carpio to answer her claims. This young researcher shames him.

STUPID, bungling or lying conspirators — you decide.

For all their flag-waving shrieks that China is encroaching on our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and must be fought even to the point of war — as Benigno Aquino 3rd implied in 2011 — these Yellows have used spurious maps of our EEZ and our territorial seas, which in effect even gave away huge swaths of our maritime zone. The maps they disseminated are spurious in that all of them were not issued as official maps by the Philippine government, specifically by the sole mapping agency, the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (Namria). As that authority informed me on January 22 in response to my freedom of information request, it has not and cannot issue maps of our territorial sea and EEZ as it is still “awaiting for the maritime zones bill to become law… which will be its basis in preparing the official map.”

Spurious Map 1: The very first (“Fig. 1” in the book) map that retired Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio — arguably the de facto spokesman of a Sinophobic stance on the South China Sea dispute — presented in his e-book on the controversy was, quite astonishingly, from a mere Wikipedia entry.

First of a series on our messy maritime claims
THE likes of former Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio and Aquino 3rd’s bungling former Foreign Affairs secretary Albert del Rosario have been incessantly ranting against China, that it is encroaching on our exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and our “West Philippine Sea” (WPS).

A bit of a problem though: we do not have an EEZ nor a territorial sea — yet. We have not enacted a law indicating these maritime areas. The government agency that has the sole authority to define such areas as provided by law and locate it in official maps says so.

We may not even have a West Philippine Sea, since President Benigno Aquino 3rd’s administrative order giving that name to the waters off the western side of the Philippine archipelago implicitly stipulated that a big part of it is the EEZ, which however really has a phantom existence at this time.

Yes in theory, we have such maritime areas, since we ratified the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (Unclos) in 1984, which stipulated that the EEZ “shall not extend beyond 200 nautical miles from the baselines.”

“DIVIDED States of America” has been the title since last year of numerous articles and documentaries in US and Western media which juxtaposes — with some sarcasm — the “united” in that nation’s name to the deep fissure in American society that has been laid so starkly bare.

I can’t think of any developed country with such a deep de facto partitioning of its society.

Despite Trump’s colossal bungling in handling the pandemic, making the US the worst hit by Covid-19, 74 million Americans, or 47 percent of voters, still want him to lead the country.

America’s political leadership vividly demonstrates the division. The Democratic Party has 51 percent of the House of Representatives, while its rival, the Republicans, have 49 percent. Its Senate is cleanly cut into two, with each party having 50 seats (actually, two independents are the Democrats’ allies), giving the vice president the additional and crucial job as tie-breaker.

AT this time of year, the Communist Party, its cultural bases like the University of the Philippines (UP) and its fronts celebrate what made possible that party’s rise, the so-called “First Quarter Storm” from January to March 1970 and on a much lesser scale, the “Diliman Commune” of February 1971. These two events convinced — or fooled — droves of idealistic youth that a Philippine revolution was at hand, and the Communist Party was its vanguard.

I put those events within apostrophes because there is something fake about those terms, as it is demonstrative of how Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Ma. Sison was a master propagandist, quick to grab credit for those historic events by tagging them with labels of communist origin. Sison plagiarized the term “First Quarter Storm” from Mao Zedong’s “January Storm” in January 1967, the uprising of his Red Guards in Shanghai that was the start of his “Great Cultural Revolution” that turned out to be a political and economic catastrophe for China.

“Diliman Commune” on the other hand was copied from the “Shanghai People’s Commune, set up also that month, which became that city’s ad hoc government during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, in the Diliman Commune, slogans, even if totally irrelevant, of the Shanghai Commune were painted on the UP walls such as “Set up rebel Committees,” “Dare to think, dare to act” and “To rebel is justified.”

NOPE, that’s not a quote from the current University of the Philippines Diliman chancellor Fidel (named after the Cuban dictator) Nemenzo, who should stick to his field — mathematics — rather than dabble in political discourse, of which he knows nothing about. His claim that the abrogation of the 1989 UP-Department of National Defense (DND) accord is an attack on the university’s academic freedom is as if he declared two plus two is five.

That quote is from his father Francisco, who got his PhD in political science from the United Kingdom’s University of Manchester and who was UP president from 1999 to 2005 and in the 1960s, was a ranking member of the old USSR-supported Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas.

This infinitely wiser Nemenzo, in a paper titled “The Continuing Relevance of Academic Freedom,” very insightfully pointed out: “Academic freedom, in the words of Angela Davis (the noted American academic and longtime member of Communist Party of the US in the 1960s — RDT) is an empty concept, which professors use to guarantee their right to work undisturbed by the real world, undisturbed by the real problems of society.”