by Antonio C. Abaya
from Standard Today 
This article first appeared in the April 12, 2007 issue of the Manila Standard Today. I am running it again in view of the triple whammy that hit this battered country in the past 35 days or so: Ondoy, Pepeng and Santi. More than a month after Ondoy, many lakeshore towns – including nearby Taguig, Pasig, Sta. Cruz – are still under water.
The title is admittedly whimsical. God uses no doormat, and God does not “choose.” But if anything, it undercuts the self-congratulatory parochial claim that …

by Erick San Juan
As in the past, no stock market will make money in this wipe-out, as told by the “Wall Street Underground” in 2001. What we’re seeing now is not a cyclical economic slowdown that a stimulus from the Federal Reserve will resolve. It could lead to the greatest economic wipe out which include your real estate, jobs, savings, and your business or everything you own. Understand what’s happening to your country and the world. Countries like the Philippines have invested their mutual funds (both public & private) abroad …

by Erick San Juan
While cleaning my library this weekend due to typhoon Ondoy’s fury that rainwater entered some of my book shelves, I happened to get the files of the Wall Street Underground, a group of stock market analysts in the U.S. who exposed the sting operations of power brokers and carpetbaggers, due to greed has siphoned the money of unsuspecting investors. It said that America, the world’s last standing super power will inevitably fall. Just like what happened to England who used to conquer 4/5 of the world under …

Telltale Signs
by Rodel Rodis
 
Historical records do not cite the names of any of the “Luzon Indios” aboard the Nuestra Senora de Buena Esperanza when it landed in Morro Bay, California on October 18, 1587. All we know of the people who would later be called “Filipinos” was that the Esperanza’s captain, Pedro de Unamuno, wrote in his log that his crew was composed of “Luzon Indios”.  All the natives of the Spanish colonies were called “Indios”.
 
According to Unamuno’s account, because his ship needed to replenish its supplies after two months …

Telltale Signs
by Rodel Rodis
If you compared all the Philippine national heroes from Lapu-Lapu to Cory Aquino, it is unlikely that you will find two heroes more uncannily similar, in how they lived and how they died, than Dr. Jose Rizal and Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr.
Both came from similar backgrounds, their families were below hacendero level landed gentry; both studied at the elite Ateneo school; both traveled extensively; wrote prolifically and returned to the Philippines despite warnings that th ey faced certain death upon setting foot on native soil.
Both were tried …

Philippines: A Country Study
by Ronald E. Dolan
Source: U.S. Library of Congress

Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino was, like his life-long rival Ferdinand Marcos, a consummate politician, Philippine-style. Born in 1932, he interrupted his college studies to pursue a journalistic career, first in wartime Korea and then in Vietnam, Malaya, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Like Marcos, a skilled manager of his own public image, he bolstered his popularity by claiming credit for negotiating the May 1954 surrender of Huk leader Luis Taruc. The Aquino family was to Tarlac Province in Central Luzon …

Scotsman Angus L. Campbell has been a Manila resident since the 1960s and the resident historian of the Manila Club (the British Club) — William M. Esposo
An Historical Footnote
by A.L. Campbell
In 2005, sixty years after U.S. Forces liberated Manila from the Japanese invaders, three British military historians published a book, The Battle for Manila. While it summarizes the three years of the Occupation, it concentrates in great detail upon the fighting, street by street and building by building, in the city. Much of it was based on the memories of …

AS I WRECK THIS CHAIR
by William M. Esposo
from Philstar
The 1945 Battle for Manila where over 100,000 civilians were killed is especially close to your Chair Wrecker’s heart. Born four years after that bloody battle, I listened to stories — first hand accounts — of people who lived through that hell.
Because nobody easily forgets the hell that they went through, I saw the anguish in the faces of the people who were in the Intramuros, Ermita and Malate areas where most of the over 100,000 civilians perished. At times, I thought …

by Renato Redentor Constantino

It’s likely no one ever asked Ebe Dancel if he meant it this way when he wrote the first lines of Sugarfree’s haunting classic, Kwarto. But I suspect he’d agree if I tell him the moment his songs are first played in public, they’re actually no longer his.
If there was ever a soundtrack to the chapter on memory and monuments in a book I’ve been writing, Kwarto would be one of the big songs, if not the opening tune. The song begins as an unintended homage to …

by George M. Hizon

Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte once said “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” Later, it became a cue for European and Japanese colonizers to take advantage of that huge but weak nation. Great Britain was the first aggressor when it tried to smuggle opium into China in 1804. The Chinese vehemently objected to this and the end result was their defeat in the First Opium War of 1839-42. Later, China was forced to tolerate the entry of opium …