As according to your hearts, go and do

In this servant's heart is a seeking to honor the works of his hands and thereby gaining honor from people. He finds a kind of satisfaction in being an obedient servant to the Gong; for the Gong is an expert fisher of men.

When the mallet of demagoguery hits the Gong, the Gong reverberates with the sound of death. And indeed, there was death, and there will be death again, and it will not be few.

Among all the leadership callings, there are a very few calling that can match the burden of the calling of a demagogue.

Recall that it was the Lord God who hardened the demagogue Pharaoh's heart. And recall also that it is the Lord God who places and removes kings.

To the Gong, do as according to the dictates of your demagogue heart. When your time is fulfilled, as in the days of Pharaoh, there shall be a glaring contrast between man's honor and God's glory; between man's thoughts and God's thoughts; between man's ways and God's ways.

Because they rule the land, the Gong and his servants are forced to live by the sword. But as it is written: "Whoever lives by the sword, will also die by the sword." When their time is fulfilled, it shall be like the fate of Pharaoh and his soldiers.

O how high are your thoughts, O Lord! And O how great are your ways!

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9)

       

Bad leadership hurts good cops

Bad leadership hurts good cops
By Federico D. Pascual Jr. 
POSTSCRIPT (The Philippine Star)
Updated August 27, 2017 - 12:00am

Sa totoo lang, karamihan ng mga pulis matitino. After decades of newspapering, mostly pounding the beat, I dare say that most policemen are good officers actuated by their duty to serve and protect the people.

The key problem of the police, it seems, is bad leadership. Uniformed men are trained to follow orders almost by reflex, which should be the case in tight, fast-moving situations. An order need not always be in black and white, although this is preferred, but a mere hint of what a trusted leader wants done is done by his men.

It is in this undefined gray area where the ill effects of bad leadership manifest themselves. Although properly briefed, the men on the spot may not have much time to reflect and will go by instinct and reflexes honed by training. Miscalculations can be costly.

An entirely different scenario is if the men were told in advance to shoot and kill (not just to maim or disable) with the least resistance of the targets, or if they have been given the impression that the team has a kill-quota to meet.

Was this the case in the recent “One Time-Big Time” raids that scored a staggering number of dead drug suspects? The possibility of excessive force having been used is something that an impartial investigation will have to find out. (http://tinyurl.com/y8l6nrz8)

Nobody on either side wants to get hurt or killed in a raid, but some persons still end up being shot. And, belatedly, some lawmen are surprised to find themselves now on the carpet for following orders or obeying their conditioned reflexes to shoot.

Some policemen seem to have started to think, especially after the gunning down of the Albuera mayor in his detention cell last Nov. 5, that they will be protected, even rewarded, if they kill in the name of President Duterte’s anti-narcotics campaign.

But it is turning out, after the last raid in Caloocan where 17-year-old Kian delos Santos was shot dead, that when the air gets too hot, their lord and protector himself will order the prosecution of those who get careless with their supposed license to kill.

Whereas the President used to tell policemen they have his unqualified support, to shoot those who fight back or to make them fight back if they don’t, that a pardon awaits them, et cetera, now he is suddenly conscious of the law. He now qualifies his confusing order to shoot:

“In the performance of your duty, which means that everything has to be legal. I will protect you, kayong mga pulis. Trabaho lang kayo. At kung lumaban, basta in the performance of duty, ’yun na ’yun. Just for three minutes. Pardon me for saying it, but ang pulis kasi is ’yung interface niya sa tao. But I don’t know hindi ako – basta ito.”

If you ask me and the next policeman you meet, the rules of engagement as the President now attempts to define them off the cuff are not clear. So now, the men are probably asking: Ano ba talaga, ser?

• Will a divided nation allow Take-2?

A HINT of where the spilling of blood is headed is an admission by President Duterte in Marawi on Thursday that he won’t be able to lick the drug menace until the end of his term in 2022. (It was actually a reiteration of a similar confession made days ago.)

What this means, at first glance, is that there would be a rethinking of his anti-narcotics campaign and related activities. As the GPS Talking Lady says when one makes a wrong turn, “Recalculating.”

Or is Mr. Duterte hinting that he wants the Constitution changed to allow him to stay beyond his six-year term? This requires a Take-2, an entirely different political recalculating – and probably a realignment of forces. Or an upheaval.

As quoted by Star reporter Edith Regalado, the President said: “Nangako ako that I will do away with the shabu. Ngayon, alam ko na na hindi ito matutupad, na hindi talaga matapos ‘to”. (I promised that I’ll do away with shabu. Now I know it won’t be fulfilled, that this really will not end).

That he promised to pursue the anti-narcotics campaign despite the odds points to a calculated recalculation, a reprogramming. But note the other message superimposed on Mr. Duterte’s admission of the likely failure of his touted drug drive:

“Let us try to create a country that is – huwag naman ‘yung mayaman na tayo lahat (not where all of us are rich) – a country that is comfortable. May five years pa ako. Give me a chance to work ulit.

“Pretend that I am doing well. Just give me the remaining years. Five years pa naman. And we will build a strong country and a strong armed forces and police.”

To many of us watchdogs in mainstream media, giving the President more time to finish the job is not much of a problem. He should reach out instead to the victims of injustice and the uneven application of the law, and console the families of innocent victims of state terrorism.

Maybe he should also tell his communications managers to rein in their army of bloggers and disable their unthinking bots. The unabated Battle of the Blogs only fuels animosity and disunity. Nobody wins, except those paid – by us taxpayers! – for scattering false news and ad hominem.

If President Duterte cannot bind the wounds and unite the citizenry – while also busy tackling foreign relations issues – he will fail, as he has started to sense, not only in his drug drive but also in other things he has set out to do without a road map and a compass.

The big problem is that Mr. Duterte’s failure will be the failure of all of us. Damay tayong lahat!

          

Allocating press freedom

Allocating Press Freedom
By Vergel O. Santos
Newspoint, Rappler
August 26, 2017

In 2020, the pioneering broadcast network ABS-CBN will lose its franchise if President Duterte gets his way. But what has he got to do with franchising, a purely congressional business? He has none, of course, but that’s true only in theory.

As is only too obvious in today’s practice, collusion, if not outright conspiracy, characterizes the relationship between the President and Congress, two of the 3 supposedly equal and independent branches of government. The third branch – the judiciary – may not be a relevant player at the moment, but, since news-media franchising is intrinsically a constitutional issue – a freedom issue – it’s bound to be dragged into the fray in the end, thus tested for its own sense of independence.

Apparently, the only reason Duterte wants ABS-CBN out of business is he dislikes its journalism. Anyway, with Congress proving itself a consistent colluder with Duterte – he has not lost a vote in it – it is expected to go along with him and deny the news network a new franchise.

In the hands of a political club like Congress, instead of an independent commission, the authority to bestow franchises is always potentially dicey business, and downright dangerous to a democracy where the applicant is one of the press, government’s natural adversary.

But why does any media enterprise have to be franchised at all? Why does it have to ask for its allocation of freedom?

Effectively, franchising constitutes curtailment of press freedom, therefore unconstitutional. If franchising is conceded at all, it should be as a merely practical function, one akin to that of an arranger, confined basically to assigning places in a public domain for purposes of keeping order – it may be compared with, say, directing air traffic from an airport tower.

But even that function has been rendered irrelevant by the times – anachronistic. If space in that domain seemed limited before, it was only because technology had not advanced enough to disprove the notion; it has since done so. The unfranchised broadcast bombardment we get from all over the world, from all sorts of cultures, and in all manner of tongues should be proof enough.

But, a man observed to be inordinately fixated on power and vengeance, Duterte still wants ABS-CBN silenced. Understandably, a chill has blown across the media landscape; to Duterte, after all, silencing is a standard solution to anything that assaults his ears. Once, when foul-mouthing the media into silence at a press conference failed yet to satisfy his narcissistic longing to be believed as some ordained messenger of truth and wisdom, he decided to bar them. Some reporters are only thankful to not have suffered worse; Duterte’s capability for taking silencing to extremes is legendary. His war on drugs gives a frightening running illustration: it has taken the lives thousands of drug dealers and addicts.

Not a few news practitioners have admitted to me they feel intimidated, and much of the current journalism does tend to betray that feeling: hard questions go unasked and, as a result, reporting shows critical gaps. Opinion writing is itself timid, thus easily drowned out by the loud and savage and unrelenting torrents from Duterte trolls and bloggers online and conscripts from the mainstream media.

There necessarily is a huge price to pay in freedom for all this fear, this timidity, this default. However understandable, it constitutes a surrender of a measure of press freedom and a betrayal, to the same extent, of the public interest. And, with an adversary like Duterte, the situation can only get worse for anyone who values civility and reason, not to mention freedom, truth, and justice.

The more the press, the supposed vanguard for those values, becomes intimidated, the more Duterte tries to intimidate it. It’s simply the nature of the man, as certified to clinically and as now revealed spectacularly in his presidency.

How, indeed, could the elephant in the room be denied? It’s there rumbling in all its “antisocial, narcissistic” glory; it’s there exhibiting “gross indifference, insensitivity...[and a] grandiose sense of self-entitlement and manipulative behaviors”; and it’s there parading a deviancy all too familiar to the press: a “pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate others and violate their rights and feelings.”

          

Mga Kababayan, huwag na tayong mananatiling mga VACC

METHOD TO MADNESS
By Tonyo Cruz
Manila Bulletin
Aug. 26, 2017

If a man – let’s call him Vitaliano – was held hostage by a drug addict armed with a grenade, that would be a crime. But if his security detail, ostensibly law enforcers, would hostage him, that would be a crime too – but worse.

Drug addicts are in a different mental state. Which is why medical practitioners say they should be handled differently and in a more effective way. Law enforcers — in a perpetual state of being alagad ng batas — are expected to be better and different.

Drug addicts-turned-criminals face criminal charges. Law enforcers-turned-criminals face not only criminal charges. They face charges for violating rules and laws that oblige them to serve and protect civilians, to save the innocent, and to capture alive the criminals so they could face a court of justice. They are given pistols, badges and a uniform for precise reasons.

Grabbing, punching, planting a gun, making Kian delos Santos run, shooting him point blank as he knelt, and planting sachets of shabu on — these are not among the reasons why we organized a national police. Only criminals would do that to the likes of Kian, a Grade 11 student and a son of an OFW.

And thus we rage over Kian’s murder and demand that this entire government do its job as set down by the law: Investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of the cold-blooded killing.

When he appeared this week at the Senate, the Secretary of Injustice came prepared and brought garbage. It is no longer important whether he invented those trashy ideas or they were gathered for him by the PCOO assistant secretary. The important thing is that they were/are wrong.

Vitaliano Aguirre was choosy: He complained that Kian’s case is overblown. He did not complain that the police pumped two or three bullets into Kian’s head as he fell and lay prostrate on the dirt.

We cannot blame Aguirre and PNP chief Bato dela Rosa for doing everything to demonize Kian and to legitimize his murder. The three bullets that were shot through Kian’s head symbolically skidded and then pierced through the pathetic lies behind President Duterte’s war on drugs.

Remember: Duterte has not stopped talking about his List of Narcopoliticians and says we have become a narco-state.

But what does he do to the narcopoliticians? Some get absolved after visiting him, the rest get a chance to prove their innocence.

The bullets that killed Kian tore holes through Duterte’s List of Narcopoliticians.

The PNP has a different list. We don’t know how they made such list which just magically appeared after June 30, 2016. Some say it included surrenderees and reformed addicts, and those misled into signing pieces of paper in Tokhang operations.

The bullets that killed Kian tore holes through the PNP’s List of Drug Personalities.

If Duterte and Bato really believe they’re correct that we have become a narco-state, surely police generals would have made that possible either thru negligence or being in cahoots with the syndicates. But no PNP revamp. The two murdered mayors could be nothing but a warning to the others in Duterte’s List who haven’t gone to worship at his feet or join his ruling coalition.

For all their declarations of a big national problem of narcopolitics, all Duterte wants are affidavits and due process for Pulong Duterte, Peter Lim, the drug lords at Bilibid and the narcopoliticians. For the poor and victims of narcopoliticians — Duterte offers only death certificates.

How and why Kian and 12,000 others have ended up dead in this so-called war against narcopolitics is for Duterte, Bato and Aguirre to answer. Indeed, if narcopolitics is the problem, why are their victims and the innocent the ones being neutralized?

Aguirre has to answer other questions. The DDS media network led by PCOO assistant secretary Mocha Uson is accusing him of monumental incompetence. They say justice is not being given to victims of rapes, massacres, murders, theft, kidnapping and other crimes perpetrated by drug-crazed criminals. The PNP chief must also explain why the police has not nabbed or filed information on the criminals.

The president’s men and minions are falling all over themselves trying to demonize Kian because his murder exposes the abuse of power started by Duterte and which is now practiced by the police. Kian’s case also show there may really be no vigilante groups: the “alagad ng batas” are the death squads.

This is not about intelligence — whether the lack of it or depending on the DDS media network for it. This is about power and its abuse. Congress has been complicit, and thereby gave up its role as a check on presidential abuse. The DOJ and Congress gave immunity and protection to drug lords that willingly played a role in causing the prosecution of a senator. Meanwhile, no case has been filed against the smuggler of the P6.4-billion shabu found by Customs.

They excuse themselves by saying it is complicated to file charges against the big-time shabu smuggler. True — because it is complicated to file charges where the president’s son could be implicated. That’s not a deficit in intelligence. That’s abuse of power.

Compared to actually fighting narcopolitics, it is easier to kill suspected addicts and pushers at any urban poor community. Also easier to make sachets of shabu and plant them as evidence — and have the entire DDS media network and its troll army attempt to justify everything.

Like Duterte, the DDS media network always pretends to be against rapists, kidnappers, murderers, thieves and other criminals. They say most of the criminals are drug users or are also part of drug syndicates. But exactly how the killings give justice to the victims, they cannot tell. They cannot even identify many of the slain people, in the first place. They are like vultures, preying on the dead.

President Duterte, who is the brains behind the war on drugs, has lost the moral basis to continue this war. It is a war against science, against the Constitution, against the record of similar failed wars elsewhere, and against the innocent and the poor. It is a war that favors his son and the powerful. It is a war without end — not only because he failed to end it as he promised. It is a war without end because it rests on abuse of power, wrong assumptions, imagined importance, short-circuited processes, and inflated egos.

All of the talk from Duterte, Bato, dela Rosa and Uson cannot change the simple facts about Kian. He didn’t rape anybody. He didn’t massacre a family in Bulacan. He wasn’t an addict. He was closing his family’s store and was about to rest for a test the next day. In my book, that’s a model son who the state must serve and protect.

Kian’s last words were not for the police or the authorities. “Tama na po” was for the people of the Philippines. If the government thinks and insists a Grade 11 student is a legitimate target for its drug war, we are obligated and justified to stand up and call for an end to the madness.

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Mga Kababayan, huwag na tayong mananatiling Voiceless Against Cops' Crimes (VACC). Sa mga lehitimong operasyon ng ating mga kapulisan na saan naaayon sa tamang pamamaraan at hindi lumalabag sa rule of law at due process, buong-buo tayong sumasang-ayon. Subalit sa mga pamalakad nila na taliwas sa batas, huwag tayong matakot na magsalita laban nito. Ipahag natin ang ating mga saluobin na tumututol sa mga krimen na nagawa, ginawa, at gagawin pa ng ating mga kapulisan dahil sa kanilang mapagmamalabis at mapangaabusong paggamit ng kanilang kapangyarihan nitong isinasagawa at tinatawag nilang gyera kontra druga.

Huwag nating hayaan na ang ating mga kapulisan, na siyang inaasahan natin na mga tagapagtanggol at tagapagbigay proteksyon sa atin, ay baka magka-develop ng "culture of impunity" at baka ang kulturang ito ay mananatili na sa kanilang kaisipan at baka ito ay magiging mindset na nila at baka sila ay mag-evolve at magigi ng isang "government killing machine" kahit hindi na si Digong ang presidente. At baka sa tuwing may anti-drug operation sila na gagawin, kahit hindi na si Digong ang presidente, kung ano na ang kanilang nakasanayang gawa sa panahon ni Digong, yun na rin ang kanilang patuloy na gagawin.

Kaya, sa ibang mga kababayan natin, kung maari, tigilan na ang pagiging Volunteers Against Chief's Critics (VACC). Sa halip, magkaisa tayo sa pagiging tunay na Vanguards Against Cruelty on Civilians (VACC) sa pamamagitan ng ating pagiging Vociferous Advocates against Crime and Corruption (VACC).