Corruption remains a significant challenge across much of ASEAN, as reflected in the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI – published annually by Transparency International), where Singapore ranks highly clean while countries like Myanmar, Cambodia, and…
Embarrassing political chaos, Duterte’s imprisonment, elite squabbles, and an economic slowdown are causing concern and skepticism after Manila assumed ASEAN chairmanship in January of this year. Malaysian and Indonesian figures are criticizing the Philippine legal…
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Soma is the ultimate tool of social control. A government-issued drug that delivers instant euphoria, erases unhappiness, and prevents citizens from questioning their engineered reality, Soma is the lynchpin…
After “pacifying” the islands (except the hinterlands of Muslim Mindanao), America set out to refashion the Filipino. In this there was method as well as design. American teachers came first, followed by American missionaries, then…
A diplomat, after a seven-year tour of duty in the Philippines, once christened the islands an “enchanting archipelago.” Whether he was merely being polite, or had succumbed to government pitchmen, or had himself become enchanted…
In light of the recent online assaults spat out by a few, well-known Beijing proxies like Rigoberto “Bobi” Tiglau and Adolfo “Ado” Pagliwanan directed at USAF Lt. Col. (ret.) Raymond Powell – in reaction to…
