The Philippine deep state
Analysis and Opinion
By Joe America
A long time compatriot on Twitter, an intellectual pragmatist, referred me to a You Tube panel discussion of the American “deep state” featuring a couple of university foreign policy notables, John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs, from the University of Chicago and Columbia University, respectively.
I got about halfway through the video when the intellectual smugness of the two became overbearing, so I turned it off. Their position is that the US has a well-intrenched foreign policy dominion that is constant through all administrations and it is driven by the sole purpose of accumulating and exercising power. I concede that what they say is true. What to do about the beast, if anything, I leave to Americans other than me.
But it struck me that the Philippines may also have a deep state within its governing framework. What is it? Well, it is not a foreign policy state. The Philippines is a pawn of international players, not a pusher. If the Philippines has a deep state, it is domestic.
How do I find this deep state? What are the enduring commonalities within Philippine government that exist no matter who is running the show? That pass from one government to the next?
Here’s what I see:
- Funding of dynasties that bicker endlessly, undeterred by compromise. Little lords.
- Oppressive, authoritarian administrative might exercised via minutiae in laws.
- Reactive programs endlessly fixing things rather than building a modern nation.
The Philippine deep state is one of smallness, isn’t it? It sure seems so to me.
Why is that?
I long ago recognized that power is the most basic, root human currency. Not money or goods or spiritual righteousness. They are the outputs and tools of humans, not the currency. As the US exploits its power over lesser countries, and tries to make strong ones lesser, the Philippines exploits its power domestically by keeping its citizens suppressed.
It is a highly effective deep state, keeping citizens uneducated and poor, smothering ambition with laws and making sure citizens know who is boss. And the bosses are not the people even if President Aquino pretended they are.
Just look at the way Filipinos are held back! Administrative red tape and harassment (NBI clearances, boy howdy!). PNP as a goon shop, not to protect and serve. Local intimidations, down to the barangay!. Regimented little rote learning schools. Day labor, not careers! Sing the national anthem correctly or be punished! Even religion is worked into government routines! What a great way to subjugate people! Ridiculous paperwork to get anything done and always, always, the glowering presence of totalitarian clerks scowling down to keep the little people little.
The Philippine deep state keeps itself secure so that the entitled may retain their chairs, no matter how incompetently or corruptly they sit in them. Administration after administration. From Aguinaldo to Marcos, Jr.
Filipinos are kept little.
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Cover photograph created by Word Press image generator using the article as the prompt.
The Society of Honor by Joe America 
I watched that video a few minutes after it was posted.
This is a related video on the deep state:
operative in all of this is a state apparatus that is mostly unelected and exercising outsized power due to the nature of government and bureaucracy.
Recent supreme court ruling in US on Chevron is instructive. The rule of law is operative if you are connected and or powerful and or rich which are just different manifestations of practically the same thing in the PH.
You get jeepney modernization which I am guessing didn’t have an enabling law but was subsumed within the regular powers of the LTFRB.
We need to get our Chevron moment as unelected officials are setting policy without clear basis in reality.
Part of me is against over studying.
We have to be nimble but everything in government is legalistic bureaucratic BS.
Yes, legalistic bureaucratic bs that is safe and secure for the law-writers. In eliminating risk, they eliminate progress. They assure a morass of conflicting issues that are fed into a moribund court system. Year upon year of frozen progress ensues. The Philippine deep state is the opposite of bold. It is timid. It is cowardly in fact. It is quicksand for those striving to get things done. The harder you try, the deeper you sink.
One of the major problems with government in the Philippines is the legislative/deliberative body often is subservient to the executive, rather than being co-equals. One can see this at the national level as well as in LGUs with councilmen acting quite similar vis a vis the mayor. This has many modern factors, such as the waves that often bring an executive into power often stacking the legislative body with their allies, general cowardice of the legislators (save occasional outliers) in taking responsibility therefore voluntarily abdicating power to executives by rubber stamping, then no one really knowing what to do so they keep themselves and everyone else busy with paperwork/requirements since that’s perceived as the safer bet. These modern behaviors have antecedents to the Spanish colonial period, as the American transformation of the system was not complete. Some behaviors such as imperiousness have even older origins, probably during the tribal times before colonization. The Philippines can sometimes seem like a bad facsimile of modern democratic republics, and that’s because it is. Either adopt good governance from abroad fully, or develop a native inspired system that accomplishes the same.
Fr. Jaime Bulatao, S.J. wrote that the Philippines has split-level Christianity.
I also see the country as having “split-level democracy,” meaning that what it is officially is very different from reality.
Well the elite and privileged in any country “play by different rules,” as there is no true egalitarian culture, neither in the US which was founded upon Enlightenment liberté, égalité, fraternité, nor in the Scandinavian democracies once immigrants disturbed ethnic homogeneity, so I wouldn’t fault the Philippines on the fact that there is an uneven application of democracy and law. The difference is how wide the disparity between the top and the bottom is. In high-end subdivisions, I’d say the life is modern and even nicer than it is for me here in Southern California, with countless drivers, maids, helpers, staff where I need to do everything on my own. In slums or the bukid, life can often teeter on the edge of complete calamity, where I’ve heard people say “at least we are better than Indians and Africans.” Well I can say to that that India is well along in modernization, and Africans are rapidly modernizing while the Philippines seems to stay stuck as if in an “alimpuyo.”
That’s true. Even Aquino “paid” legislators to do his bidding. But, again, the system is Filipino reflecting the vertical hierarchy of power that has existed since independence. It can’t be anything but what it is. No one can command the legislature to be independent of executive. No one can throw out the SC, COMELEC, DOJ, the Security Council, or disband PNP because they are still Duterte stooges. You can pick opportunities to move toward that, but the idea that the Philippines can be America’s ideal democracy is outside the bounds of what is doable. And, frankly, America can’t even hold itself to American ideals.
Joe, I agree that the Philippines can’t be an ideal democracy in the American model. However, despite occasional periods of backwardness the US has generally kept marching forward with getting closer to her founding ideals. With the Philippines if the problem were to be approached from a top level effort, a forward looking President could place political appointees as is the executive’s right who share his/her vision, to start reforming the system. I think Aquino did a mighty effort towards this regard. If the process could be repeated again over the course of a decade, that would give time for a honest and hard working bureaucracy to gain a foothold.
When right of way gets in the way.
https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/topstories/specialreports/921862/metro-manila-subway-when-right-of-way-gets-in-the-way/story/
DJB pointed me to several Mearsceimer videos and one is about offensive realism.
Offensive has two definitions. 1. irritating and unlikable, or 2. attack oriented. I can see realism as being either. It also makes sense that DJB would like Mersheimer because DJB is outright hostile to the US, as Mersheimer is hostile to the deep state, which is essentially 250 years of accumulated resources backing the principles of democracy and American exceptionalism. I wonder if DJB sees a Philippine deep state. By way of background, he and I had an extensive debate on Twitter about the US and Philippines. We ended the debate before I blocked him for being a Chinese stooge. He could never explain how he would get China out of Philippine waters.
I also “noticed” his pro Chinese leanings.
Then he told me he is just provoking.
I already have enough of provoking from LCX, So I just let him be.
I don’t know what to make of the whole Imee Marcos development vis a vis Deep State, karl. let me read up on that. cuz i gotta feeling theres connection there.
Just do not over connect the dots just like you always do and we all would not get lost.
If 17 sees coincidences in somethings you invent coincidences.
I think Filipinos having pride in their accomplishments is a good thing. But pride for the sake of not wanting to admit one keeps trying to hammer square blocks into round holes doesn’t accomplish anything. That’s how I tend to see the modern Filipino “nationalist” movement, whether they come from the left or right spectrum. I too noticed their curious affinity for China.
Ah, thanks for the insights, Karl.
Welcome.
ah, here are things that cannot be discussed for the sake of national security, as expected there would be some intentional misdirections.
so speaking of misdirection, we now have pagers that can blow up and we have got to be careful ships leased will not blow up on command.
Everything is possible. All you need is an insider in the factory , shop or whatnot.
What if the question to the NMC was reframed Karl? For example rather than “escort” which implies weakness and dependency that may be allergic to some, reframe it as: “allies conducting a joint mission, with commanders of both sides seeing each other as equals.” The US and other Western militaries regularly work with militaries of smaller countries, and officers see officers of the same rank as equals. The best European example is the Baltic states have very small militaries and no Air Force, yet are still accorded equal respect within NATO.
We cannot feign equality in partnerships, relationships including foreign relations. I hope those statements are not Miercheimer esque or Sachsesque.
I don’t see the connect with my suggestion with Meirsheimer or Sachs as my suggestion is based on observation of practices in other joint operations.
Here’s a recent example (April 2024) of joint operations involving the US, Japan, and South Korea to protect South Korean territorial sovereignty:
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/3739862/japan-republic-of-korea-us-navies-partner-in-trilateral-maritime-exercise/
https://apnews.com/article/japan-us-south-korea-china-joint-exercise-navy-204e42c39a1a52c0392c4004edcb7bd1
As can be seen in the ships and aircraft involved, clearly the US is the superior military partner in terms of raw equipment and men, yet as the operation happened in South Korean waters the American and Japanese commanders gave deference and respect to the South Korean commander, with the South Korean commander returning the favor.
I see the inability for the Philippines to see past the perceived power disparity vis a vis nations offering help to be another manifestation of colonial mindset. I can’t think of one allied joint operation where officers of equal rank diminished another simply because one had a smaller ship. I’d like to think that military men and women share a culture of respect for each other and allies; they’re not politicians, they just want to get the job done.
Not your statements, I meant mine.
Mearscheimer’s foreign relations che che bure che and my che che bureche regarding equality and relationships.
Ah gotcha. Here’s another example of a joint operations:
When the British carrier is compared to the two American supercarriers, it looks positively like a toy, but its task force would be led by an admiral as well. The French being French, don’t like to be outdone so they built a large carrier (almost supercarrier size). My understanding that operations in peacetime involve no particular nation in command, and each nation’s task force just coordinates closely as equal partners. In war time that would be different with a combatant commander being selected for the combined allied task force. I hope Philippine leaders wake up to this fact fast. It’s getting to the point where time is of the essence, and there’s no time for the usual nonsense from the nationalists and far leftists. I think the nationalists can be persuaded if it is pointed out to them that things have changed since the old days (case in point the US effort to strongly repeat Filipino sovereignty of EDCA bases). The far leftists have curiously pro-China views so should be dismissed. BBM as commander in chief could set the tone if he so chooses.
“I’d like to think that military men and women share a culture of respect for each other and allies;” There is a gap between US and non-US militaries in their enlisted and officer ranks. whereas in the US said gap between officers and enlisted is mostly due to maturity eg. high school vs. college age and probably education but tiny really. then evens out with age, eg. SGT = LT. when it comes to enlisted vs. enlisted especially 3rd world enlisteds not so much NATO anglo troops though there cultural aspects, i would say education & morality (like what you and Joe said about idealism but I disagreed on the reason theres so many suicideds) its like two different worlds. I would imagine the officer side too. but different kinda dynamics plays out there like Jordanian officers or PMA then compared to an American officer that just went to state college, but i think this is just a cohort issue. but also your Attorney and Engineer crap title as dick measurment also applies. as far as physical theres no difference probably the whole nutrition as kids growing up that would be an issue, but physical strength agility etc. evens out. so for example, like theres MCMAP for Marines and Filipinos have eskrima, focus there. no more sparring or too serious training , training should be more like Muay Thai play and fun thru play. less injuries retain more muscle memory. I’ve been always a proponent of play, but sometime around UFC popularity sparring became the penis gauge, eg. we spar we don’t do that crap, and police/military training followed suit which I think they are now realizing the injuries just don’t justify the muscle memory sought. if you’re looking for military military peer to peer respect you’ll find it in martial arts, Joey. and other games like dama checkers or chess even go too. but competition thru fun & play is where its at.
I’m a lapsed practitioner of a few martial arts, and yeah I agree. In most East Asian schools of martial arts (am including Vietnamese martial arts in this grouping as well) those of differing ranks both bow deeply to each other. The lower rank just bows slightly lower out of respect. Everyone bows to the school head/master though.
One of the biggest strengths of the US military, especially in the Army and Marines, is giving junior officers and NCOs the leeway to come up with their own plans on how to carry out their orders. From my understanding, US military orders are not very complex. Usually the orders consist of an overall objective and some bullet points on sub-objectives, then it’s up to the junior officer or NCO to carry out the orders. Many nations with Western-model militaries have adopted the US system of empowering lower ranks. Ukraine is in the process of transforming itself from a top down command military to the US model of command decentralization.
Balikatan means shoulder to shoulder if and only if you are as tall as each other
In that case I’m really glad that I didn’t take the height genes from the French side of the family — they are rather short 😅
What you wrote about the Philippine Deep State reminds me of a story told by someone crossing the border between Belize and Honduras: one could see which country had an efficient British style bureaucracy and which one had a less efficient Spanish style bureaucracy. Even Rizal noticed how the court and legal system worked better in British colonies in his critique of the 1884 Penal Code, still in use in the Philippines with some 1930s revisions.
The Engineer in Miss Saigon sings: “Perfume can cover a stench, that’s what I learned from the French.” The USA didn’t touch much of the legal and administrative practices of the colony it had taken over from Spain – I have seen wordings in 19th century Philippine documents that resemble those of today’s Philippine affidavits if one translates them. The book How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr details how the USA didn’t really have any clear administrative responsibility for overseas territories as it officially didn’t want to be a colonial power.
A deep state is part of every modern state and also has advantages. Spain IIRC ran without being able to constitute a government for some months as its bureaucracy kept running. A lot of European states have no such thing as a US-style government shutdown. Early 20th century Albay kept running in the period where the Spanish were gone and the USA hadn’t really been able to take charge yet with town scribes continuing to document stuff in flowing penmanship, on the same old Spanish documentary paper (way thicker and more durable than the later US paper) and the quill pen ink that doesn’t fade as quickly as later 1920s American ballpen ink, just without the royal Spanish documentary stamp of the year. Could be the abaca planters paid their salaries, as there was a US ship in Legazpi City port to make sure the abaca traders in Salem, Massachusetts got their supply of abaca needed for shipping rope back then. Never mind that the revolutionaries still controlled the hinterlands. Business had to continue.
The architect of the modern Philippine state was Manuel Quezon. There were some reforms in Marcos Sr. times (Regions were introduced, Sandiganbayan and Metro Manila) and Cory times (Ombudsman and the PNP were created) but most of the state machinery is 1930s vintage. When I worked at computerizing stuff at the Philippine Embassy and Honorary Consulates in Germany in my student years, I experienced how it took one Honorary Consul, a German businessman, to dare ask DFA Manila if they would allow the Abstract of Receipts to be submitted in A4 format as a computer printout as long as the columns remained the same, instead of the wide bodied onion skin paper with copies in different colors originally used. The Embassy hadn’t dared touch that as they knew Manila didn’t like being questioned. Even the Honorary Consulate had to wait for months until the clearance came and I could program.
Remember how Teddy Boy Locsin was smart enough to change the silly requirement of always submitting the birth certificate for every passport renewal? That shows the mindset of the Philippine Deep State, which he dared go against, even as he is a somewhat weird personality. There are studies about colonial mindset in the Philippine government and sometimes one could literally picture Philippine bureaucrats as haughty (towards fellow “natives”) but servile (towards the powerful, no longer Spanish these days) “escribantes” (scribes) and “Ladinos” (administrative personnel) – well old habits die hard if one doesn’t try to change them actively. It took huge push back from the migrant and OFW community, and new DFA people with a service oriented mindset from 1986 onwards, to turn the DFA into an agency that actually helps people and doesn’t treat them like subjects who must bow. German bureaucracy only lost its old tone from the 1990s onwards, when service orientation was prioritized.
Enjoyable read. The deep state, which is inertia aimed at protecting the entitled, does have the advantage that it moves so intransigently (what corner of my brain did that word come from) that it also protects the system from the entitled. Thus the failure of constitution rewrites by Arroyo, Duterte, and so far, Marcos.
So the trick is to model it better, to keep the protections of law while removing the nonsense, like refusing to provide speedy trials. Making a check list and removing oppression thoughtfully to free Filipinos from needless abuse. Because it is needless. And it is abuse. Get rid of the anti-terror law. Empty the jails of minor cases. Put the police back under LGUs and mandate proper investigations and processes. End contract labor and mandate career paths. Require courtesy in every government office. Fund the ombudsman to deal with citizen complaints. Empower citizens every which way. I’m betting they’ll like it.
Ireneo, Joe, et al. where does PHILCONSA fit in all this?
And how is this Gregorio related to her? and are there Aranetas in gov’t positions now, elected or otherwise?
https://www.filipinogenealogy.com/2022/05/presumptive-first-lady-liza-araneta.html both Imee and her brother are married to Aranetas.
Mar Roxas’ mother is an Araneta. Gloria Arroyo’s husband is an Araneta descendant.
If you take my Tudor clan politics analogy of Philippine politics, the Marcoses marrying into the Araneta clan is like Owen Tudor marrying a Lancaster daughter. The Marcoses, too, were like the Tudors “mere country squires”, not Welsh but Ilokano, outside ye olde elite.
I still believe that it wasn’t quite a coincidence that three mestizo clans – Aranetas in Cubao, Ortigases in Mandaluyong, and Ayalas in Makati, managed to buy land exactly along where Quezon built what was to become EDSA. It was good business for sure.
From the chart of how all Philippine Presidents connect, Dutertes might play a role like the Stuarts, though at times, the father reminded me of Cromwell. Joey may feel free to correct me on this, and of course, these are very broad analogies, not exact ones. https://www.reddit.com/r/UsefulCharts/comments/vi8v0k/contest_submission_philippine_presidents_family/
There are good reasons why Filipinos love GOT.
Joey, thanks for the info that GOT is derived from Tudor clan politics. Well, Lancaster clearly was the inspiration for Lannister..
Ah, thanks for this chart, Ireneo. So you’re saying this Manotoc guy is also an Araneta ? but yeah, these connections are nuts!
No, he’s not. My mistake it’s Irene Marcos who is married to an Araneta.
Filipinos seem to love GOT because of the clan political intrigue and warring. The fact that the earlier seasons had tons of attractive actors/actresses probably was a bonus though.
Well in regard to Dutertes, I would consider them to be more like Charles I who was a thoroughly incompetent king who believed in his own divine right to do whatever he pleased. His bumbling tenure involved him offending foreign allies, offending the people, and eventually got his head chopped off by Cromwell. Interestingly Charles I brought death and societal instability to England due to his belief that he held more power than he actually had, which has similarities to Duterte. Charles I’s father, James VI and I who was the first Stuart king of a united England, Scotland, and Ireland was viewed favorably as a uniter, which was the cause of some of the initial unfavorable sentiment towards Charles I as he was compared to his father.
Back to GOT, I forgot to add that G.R.R. Martin was also inspired by the War of the Roses between the Plantagenet cadet branches House of Lancaster and House of York in addition to the Tudor palace intrigues. The House of Tudor’s origin was in the House of Beaufort, which was founded by a bastard son of the founder of the House of Lancaster that was later legitimized.
Irineo, sometimes I try to think about where the Philippines “lost her way” of the original revolutionary ideals of the Ilustrados. Could it be the breakpoint was when Aguinaldo took control of the apparatus of the revolution?
Even in the times of the American Revolution, the revolutionary leaders who were almost all of the upper crust of society really tried to see themselves as equals to other American colonialists (with uneven application of course). While in the French Revolution, which was lead by radical second sons of the nobility who lacked familial power, had decades of turmoil from mob lynchings, beheadings, to the neo-imperial excesses of the Napoleons. Both revolutions based on Enlightenment ideas, yet took starkly different paths.
After we had discussed previously the Spanish “patina” overlayed on top of Filipino tribal culture, continuing to the incomplete American experiment in the Philippines which overlayed an additional patina on top of the previous layers, I had started thinking about how this connects to my own observations of the lower classes I spend time with and work among. In a way, the old way of thinking had never left, with increasingly modern ideas being glued on top like a wallpaper hiding imperfections in an old wall. Farmers in the bukid still grow their crops using old methods, with that one time I created a simple irrigation system with a single-board computer had me being praised as something akin to a magician (I had used mostly open source copy-paste). People in the slums might engage in power play amongst each other, but as soon as any minor dignitary (even a tanod) shows up, they revert to extreme subservience. Doctors just come and go to their clinics whenever they feel like it, even when surgeries are scheduled (though it’s on-time at hospitals catering to the rich, because the rich are higher than the doctors). Even supervisors at a workplace who are barely higher in position than agents under them wield their petty powers to make a display of superiority.
Like your example of DFA changing from pushback by Filipinos who had become used to other systems outside of the Philippines that made more sense, this could happen within the Philippines too. Withstanding a series of good leaders getting into power, I still think that the only sure way for change is a critical mass of Filipinos to learn there are new ways of doing things, then demanding change en masse.
Like the Mandelbrot Set.
you have a beautiful picture and then you start drilling down and every step gives you another nice picture, infinitely.
Economics, social, politics. All following the same formula, creating different pictures.
But the formula never changes.
those bully authorities are just another view of the same formula .
Bully is a good keyword as the Philippines is often a “toxic hierarchic culture.” Not everyone is as egalitarian as the Scandinavians and Dutch, but today’s Japan has at least everyone bowing to everyone, higher ranks bow a bit less.
In the Philippines, it is mostly either “do you know who I am” and “who are you.” When the Beatles were told, “we treat you like ordinary person,” it meant trouble.
But Joe’s idea of changing rules might help in changing mindsets over time.
Changing rules would be incredibly hard if the elites think they will lose too much. To me it seems that Filipino elites are quite comfortable in their business engagements selling consumerism to lower Filipinos, and to those in government skimming a bit of fat off the top. I would argue that elites have much more to gain economically if they give up a bit of control, such as when lifting up the bottom classes those bottom classes now have more disposable income to spend at the malls and pay taxes to fund the government. Humans are often myopic and can’t see further than immediate needs. Seeing as quite a few Filipinos like to wear eyeglasses with fake lenses to develop a certain personal image, some willingly choose to be “blind”.
The problem is the risk calculation. 50/50 they might thrive under a fair and competitive structure. 80% they’ll get rich in the current system.
Well that’s more like risk adverse calculation on their part. Humans don’t like change and are comfortable with what we know. A fair and competitive system would make everyone richer, more so for those at the top, but when one is counting every centavo one can only see the next peso instead of a large return on a well placed investment.
Yes, that’s true. Go around any corner. There they are.
You have summarized me and Irineo’s Going Home series in one short article
including those we have missed out on.
Just like the first article of that series, The National Village, summarized four years of prior stuff in my old vlog.
This teaches us one thing: trust the process. What we write settles in our minds and other minds after time, is re-expressed more simply, especially by Joe, who does explain stuff in Mark Twain style.
It took one person named John Locke to question a work called Patriarcha, somewhat like a blogger or vlogger reacting to another, and a man named Thomas Jefferson to read his ideas and write the US Constitution based on them.
I have had visions of the future where printouts of TSOH have become the new Scripture, scholars dispute whether LCPL_X and Judas are identical, Joe is of course Joe the Baptist while the Dalai Lores is worshipped as a Buddha statue.
Seriously, I recall what sonny who is now back once wrote about the Biblical parable of the mustard seed that can spread, giving encouragement for us to press on.
I wouldn’t even mind if Heydarian copies from here, and that becomes a “Gospel” book later.
Nice! Well put!
Joe the Baptist is a Lutheran. 🤣😂🤣😂🤣
“scholars dispute whether LCPL_X and Judas are identical, “ make sure the scholars know its “Jesus Christ Superstar” Judas, and not Biblical Judas. I can see that dang tree in the distance now too. lol.
Sing for us…..your part.
gotta be this one, karl!
It always helps to repeat and align things. The article in part addresses Joey’s belief that change has to come from the ground up, but the ground is locked up tight. Voters have to be freed to know what freedom is. Can it be done? With the right president, yes. The article is a part of my 2028 election series of articles, and it will all get put together later.
Thanks for that note, Joe the Lutheran.
😂🤣😂😀😀😀
My evolution into the belief that change needs to come from the bottom up came out of the shock and realization that the hope of Aquino’s dream was immediately backtracked. When I say I believe change can be from bottom up then middle out, it’s both an acknowledgment that I have lost some confidence in the Philippine system to reform itself voluntarily, and a realization that if enough people on the bottom rungs can be persuaded to change their mindset the sheer magnitude of demands for dignity might force system change.
The moment they ask for dignity, there will be those who say, “Who are you?”
We all know what that phrase means in the Filipino context, just like what “we treat you like ordinary person, ordinary person!” meant for the Beatles.
“Who are you” will happen when there is a power disparity and the weaker side is isolated, cowed. But this didn’t happen when Marcos Sr. and family fled in the face of popular backlash. Sadly, the Philippines as a whole largely went back to old habits when given a once in a lifetime chance for systemic change. In order to have change, the elite also need to give up a bit of their power as well, willingly or not.
What about don’t you know who I am? Who are you is harmless because you can ask any stranger that question.
Who are you in English is harmless, but if what is meant is “sino ka?” it’s not.
It is just like some Filipinos mean “How dare you do X?” when they ask ,why did you do X?” I get why my father prefers Tagalog only at times.
Karl, I am not being fantastic in this matter, even as I doubt that the present Filipino generations still use fantastic to mean someone who fantasizes. LCPL_X is clearly a fantastic person quite often. He has superpowers and flies alongside UFOs.
LOL! I’d like to add more cases on top of the TicTac and Phoenix lights UFO mothership incidents. preponderance of evidence and what not. if Joe permits. Then connect this whole Deep Deeper Deepest State stuff to US and Philippines and why everythings so screwed up in the world, Ireneo.
You can do another blog about your passion. The Philippines has a satellite, but I don’t think it is looking for UFOs. Maybe typhoons. The Philippine deep state is very different than the US deep state. The secrets here are more like who stole what and how, not military or technology might in support of defense.
I think the faulty thinking is in thinking UFOs are technology based. they most likely are supernatural IMHO. I have the background info set. but I think I’ll wait a bit more so see where this Sara-Leni-Imee stuff develops towards, then I’ll just squish it into that. Joe, you said Deep State was a series how long will this series be? Joey’s already provided a beastiary of Philippine supernatural creatures let me see if I can do a matrix. cross it with other cultures and creatures. okay, I’ll shut up about UFOs now, this seems like a worthy project. thanks, Joe.
I suppose other entities could be spiritual or psychic rather than physical and technical. I’d not considered that. But, still, the “evidence” seems physical. I wonder if other entities could evolve to be living light creatures, able to span universes in what is essentially their childhood. Boy, you’ve got me going now.
My deep state is not a series. The series is dealing with 2028 elections, and deep state fits into that.
To awaken the bottom, you need a different top. The people broadly do not have opportunity-driven inspiration to internalize a different way. When the leadership can craft paths of opportunity for people, then you can get an awakening and get the voters behind reshaping of the sovereign equity.
A different leadership at the top would be the easiest way, of course. Some days I feel like giving up hope for that leadership to come though, and feel a bit better when I see people at the bottom trying to find their own way and teaching others organically. The Philippines will move forward despite the kicking and screaming by the elites. The only question is, will take another hundred years organically, or will it happen better with improved elite leadership?
Haha, some of us will be around to see and some of us not. I tend not to throw my arms in the air and wail much anymore, and try to see the depth and beauty that are here, versus my life as it was in the US, which was patterned and easy. I’ve accumulated a modest following and reputation, more among the olds than youngs, and push data into the stream hoping the right people will take note. I suspect one or two of the right people do take note, but they can’t say so.
Let’s hope the views incubated here will provide inspiration to the next generation of aspiring civil servants. If there’s one thing about us Americans is we are as stubborn with pushing forward as we are idealistic haha. The stubborn idealism is what inspires hope for change.
Let us hope the incubated views from here are not turned into balot by the less patient, and then discredited as chechebureche, “incomplicated” and all that.
I’ll be honest, I think many regular Filipinos I know would consider our discussions here “che che bureche.” I know that because when I try to discuss with even Filipinos I consider my friends, they’ll say it’s useless. They are busy working and surviving; there’s no bandwidth to fill the mind with discussion. But if they have successful examples they can aspire to, I think there’s a good chance at least a slowly increasing number of Filipinos will take a chance on to change their mindset. Filipinos often need to be inspired by what they see and hear. I haven’t met that many poor Filipinos who are patient enough to read even a few pages, much less blogs.
There is a huge theoretical to practical gap in the Philippines, which makes people suspicious of plans on paper or eloquent “Miss Universe statements.” On the Liberal side, there was the Pangilinan Law, which prohibited jailing minors below 15, but the Boys Towns and Girls Towns planned for delinquent minors were not built in many places, so it seems delinquency went up then; and K-12 which laudably started teaching in mother tongue until Grade 2 to transition kids better to Tagalog and English, but the details of implementation especially in complex places like Metro Manila were not considered, so chaos.
The issue is IMO how hierarchy is lived in the Philippines: there is no defined polite way to give feedback to higher ups. Pointing out deviations between what is on the ground is needed in any larger organization but in the Philippines that is often seen as defiance. Or even as questioning the judgment of your superior – in the barangays of old, he or she saw everything as it was on a smaller scale, and I suspect many are still mentally stuck there. Even Japanese corporate culture has face-saving ways of getting on the ground feedback. In the Philippines, bosses often don’t listen, and more often, subordinates don’t say hey we have issues with this and that. There are higher-ups who even are proud to say, “I don’t care too much about minor details.” One who works on the ground like Mar Roxas is ridiculed. How can such a culture self-correct?
That is an excellent point, Irineo. The power pushes down and rejects anything pushing up. Because it ia an affront to power. Everyone is running scared I suppose. Littleness.
Apologies for the late reply here Irineo. I was reflecting and composing notes throughout the day to organize my thoughts, to no avail.
The failure due to the gap between theoretical and practical to me is a sign that the “deep state,” ahem bureaucracy, has failed. In other countries the legislators will authorize certain laws to provide a vision, then it would be up for the executive or prime minister to carry out that vision. Of course, the Philippines has a very large and deep bureaucracy, but it seems Filipino bureaucrats often take a “wait and see” approach to instructions. It’s been shared to me that sometimes upon receiving instructions, the bureaucrats in the department would ask for further and further clarification thus wasting time and causing over complication. Of course, I can’t imagine the tendency of superiors to publicly, harshly scold for even minor mistakes and throw subordinates under the bus doesn’t inspire an independent confidence among junior bureaucrats. To protect themselves, bureaucrats will always ask for more clarification… In the end there is a mix of micro management, spending more time on creating exhaustive research/reports, and general inaction. When there is action, I’ve often observed that the action is hurried at the last moment due to pressure to get results and that creates more opportunities for failure.
I’ve worked quite some years in Japanese corporations. Both in my reading of Japanese feudal history and as has been explained to me by Japanese colleagues, face-saving in Japanese culture is more of a modern manifestation of the elaborate dance of shows of respect from feudal Japan, rather than face-saving as seen in the Filipino context. While modern Japan is associated with collectivism, feudal Japan also had many honored examples of independent thought, such as one of my favorites the self-described “mediocre” samurai Katsu Kokichi. In a way, modern Japanese etiquette (which includes respect dynamics) is actually a democratization of the practices of nobility, much like how commoner Japanese officers and NCOs in WWII were given guntō which were modeled after the minor nobility samurai katana. Whereas in the Philippines, the dynasties many of who descended from old tribal nobility monopolize power for themselves, and society aspires to rise to positions of power in emulation of such.
I tried to think of an example of the Filipino model of respect in East Asian societies, and could not think of one. In Vietnamese culture for example, it is considered one’s duty to inform one’s superior of their errors (in a face-saving way of course). This derives from East Asian schools of thought such as Confucianism and Daoism. Of course Buddhism strives for “equality” regardless of nobility or commoner. The closest I could come is the Cham people, who while they have been deeply influenced by the Vietnamese, still retain some elements of their original culture. Cham culture is still maternalistic, like proto-Austronesian culture. However, displays of power or rituals of power are still encouraged and respected among their men. In Cham culture, women are considered the “chief of the household,” while men are considered the “chief of the village.” Generally in terms of the community, the man’s decisions are non-disputable and to dispute would incur great disrespect. The biggest example of the non-disputable position of a Cham man’s decision was the alliance of Cham chiefs that engaged in piracy which caused the Champa–Đại Việt War, in which Champa as a state was completely destroyed. Previously the Cham people and Đại Việt royalty regularly intermarried and maintained good relations. Perhaps we can find some explanations for Filipino behavior here.
On self-correction, I have a personal belief that one must first have introspection, then self-courage to change in order to self-correct. Undoubtedly the fluidity of the various Filipino tribes whose descendants now constitute the Philippines did not help, as each adopted culture was simply an overlay on top of each other, without building a cultural core first. Irineo, you have said before that Filipinos are cultural chameleons… but even a chameleon still knows he is a chameleon despite being able to change into the colors of the rainbow. Do Filipinos know who they are themselves?
Teaching is rote memorization. Seeing a psychiatrist is considered shameful. Power flows down suppressing initiative. Few read novels or insightful material. There is little grasp of the future and moving toward it. Life is reacting and doing. Arguments are about things, not ideas. One cannot conceptualize if you they don’t know what it is. This is the indescribable void that endlessly produces the nonsense we see daily. But it’s hard for me to get angry about it. Why would I be angry at myself for all the things I don’t know?
As I said before Joe, we cannot fault the ignorant as ignorance is the state of not knowing. To me ignorance is the opposite of those who know better but willfully close their eyes and shut their ears. Those who do not know may be open to learning. How to share to those who are open to learning, that’s the harder question. Some days I’m so excited when I watch poor Filipinos striving and figuring things out. Other days I feel a bit despondent that they need to figure things out themselves because they don’t have societal and governmental support to move forward.
I wrote about that topic four years ago:
Today, I see more Youtube channels in Tagalog devoted to general knowledge. It seems that the clientele is new middle class. There are also specific knowledge channels about financial literacy, or tips by OFWs or migrants on how to survive and thrive in specific countries. That is good as most Filipinos absorb knowledge more easily if it is directly useful to them AND told by someone they think they can trust. What is written is too distant for many. And too abstract.
Of course teaching oneself via social media without solid grounding in book knowledge is very dangerous – without my previous general knowledge, I wouldn’t be able to vet Youtube channels for reliability. But seriously, there are DepEd teachers who don’t teach well at all.
We got taught the codes of Kalantiaw and Sumakwel in school, that the Philippines was part of Sri-Vijaya and Majapahit, that Datu Puti was real and that Philippine languages were dialects. Fortunately, none of that garbage is still taught today, AFAIK.
Teachers who don’t glare at students if asked WHY would already be an advancement. Sure, some discipline is needed, but exploring knowledge should be encouraged as well.
Or nonsense like the music teacher who made us memorize names of indigenous music instruments without even having pictures should be banned. I was lucky to be taking piano lessons with the wife of the late National Artist Prof. Jose Maceda, a musicologist. All I had to do is drop by in informal UP Campus fashion and ask about those instruments. He showed me his collection, and I have not forgotten to this day what a kudyapi is. Or a gangsa.
I had known William H. Scott who debunked the Code of Kalantiaw and your father were contemporaries, but I did not know they were “board mates” courtesy of Marcos Sr. That must have been a rough time growing up under Martial Law. Apparently many colleagues of your father also were imprisoned under false pretense.
And actually, I have heard from people much younger than me (young Millennials and elder Gen Z) that those debunked theories are still taught today by hold-out DepEd teachers. Most of the good teachers seemed to burned out, migrated, or changed careers. There sometimes seems to be a need for the Philippines to concoct a grand mythical past rather than focusing on the actual many good things that Filipinos had contributed to national history and world history. I see it similarly with the excited boosting of overseas celebrities who may have 1% Filipino blood (as I often joke), do not identify as Filipino, yet are held up domestically as examples of Pinoy greatness. Why not just be proud of accomplishments of Filipinos, of which there are many?
When I spend time around the lower socioeconomic Filipinos, I can sense there is “just enough” media literacy to consume information online, usually social media nowadays. But not enough media literacy to discern which information source is good or which one is poisoned. This causes those Filipinos who have this habit to ping-pong between beliefs credulously, while not having the critical thinking skills to wonder why it is that the rapidly shifting beliefs often contradict each other. Prime targets for emotional and social manipulation by ill intentioned domestic powers, not to mention foreign powers (Mostly PRC, some Russia).
Outside of the Big Four, even many “prestigious” private universities have lazy professors who engage in rote teaching, pass out exams that are filled with questions that they had not taught, compel long research papers they do not read, change class schedules without prior notice (sometimes within the last 15 minutes) while penalizing students for minor mistakes. I’ve met some teachers and professors who initially were filled with a zealous desire to teach and expand students’ minds, but quickly were discouraged, crushed by a rigid system. Here in the US even under resourced public schools often have very dedicated teachers who try their best with what they have. I wonder what went wrong in the Philippines since you mentioned that even until the 1970s the Philippines education system was decent. Did the Marcos Sr. regime really crush education that much?
Yes, I vividly remember being surprised when we visited my father at Camp Bonifacio, the future BGC, that Scotty, a white man, was among the detainees. The detention center on a hill overlooking the Embos was full of UP professors.
Most came out after around half a year, though the likes of Roger Posadas, a theoretical physicist, were in detention for years.
https://upd.edu.ph/chancellorposadas/
Possible long detention might have been the reason why my father basically wrote the first two volumes of the Tadhana history book by himself – with an unprecedented number of researchers and direct access to the National Archives.
It did have a glorifying tone, especially with regards to pre-Hispanic chiefdoms, but stuck to the facts. As a ghostwriter, I guess one has to mimic the one asking you to write.
My father never has spoken about it, but Marcos might have made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. I also think PC picking up the American wife of a fellow UP professor, my mother’s bestie – “for deportation” and then bringing her home after driving her around the runway of MIA for hours might have been a hint directed at my father: “we can deport your wife anytime”. It is akin to them allegedly forcing Ariel Ureta to bike around Camp Crame until he collapsed for making the joke “sa ikauunlad ng bayan, bisikleta ang kailangan”, replacing “disiplina”.
As for education, public schools already were deteriorating in the 1970s. Universities might have been damaged by Marcosian pressure. I know too little, for instance, about how Angara, the UP President appointed by Marcos and the father of the Senator, changed the University. Before that, there was Corpus, who didn’t offer much in terms of resisting Marcos Sr. either – the twin factors of spineless “good” people and opportunistic types have remained over there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_P._Lopez was the one not appointed during Martial Law – small correction. Turns out he did try to defend the autonomy of UP.
Now, if I remember my mother’s story correctly, as stuff that is from so long ago and especially childhood memories can lack nuance, it was Lopez who suspended my father’s salary when he was detained – maybe he had to – and then his wife was offering my mother hand me down clothes of her kids, which she of course refused, not wanting to be treated like a mendicant – which I understand as that is something a Prussian like her would never want to be.
But wow, that is now over half a century ago. Just like how people in UP became suspicious of one another as anyone could be a snitch or a redtagger.
Even today there are many Filipinos, even those who had migrated West, who believe that Marcos Sr. was a genius. IIRC the true authorship of the Tadhana series was exposed in the early 1990s (1992?) as being written by your father and his UP colleagues. It’s seems that the professors felt consternation about the project nearly a decade after Marcos Sr. was gone, and amazing that until now many Filipinos believe that Marcos Sr. wrote the Tadhana. The propaganda efforts of the Martial Law period seems to still run deeply through the nation and even the diaspora…
This was all about 10 years before my own time so I only learned about it later on talking to diaspora Filipinos I grew up around in the 1980s. Interestingly, the exposure that educated Vietnamese such as my own family had with Filipinos was also through contact between educated persons or government officials during the time of the Republic of Vietnam. It seems that even then, not many knew about the lives of lower socioeconomic Filipinos. Both my grandfather and father mentioned that poor Filipinos seemed like a faceless mass, compared to the vibrancy of the poor in South Vietnam. At least poor South Vietnamese farmers had enough to eat I guess — things didn’t get bad there until the mismanagement by the new communist authorities after 1975, and even then the worst of it was in the 1980s and early 1990s.
I once had an interesting discussion with an elder diaspora Filipino who was very educated (he had studied in the US during the Commonwealth era). That man left the Philippines during the early Marcos Sr. years before the declaration of Martial Law and became a US government employee. He had mused that when things get so bad, humans tend to fall back to our base instincts, and as it pertains to Filipinos the higher classes will separate back into tribes so how will the lower classes have an example to look to? He was referring to the factionalization and finger pointing during Martial Law where the educated and the wealthy ended up snitching on each other to save themselves.
It is interesting to have people like this older diaspora Filipino confirm my observations, as there is so much gaslighting among Filipinos, or who knows the Marcos Sr. regime used the neuralyzer on so many people. Video nowadays makes it harder, but it still is tried often.
Filipino lower classes are probably way more loyal to each other in small groups – and to those among their patrons that they truly like, often foreign ones who are nicer than Filipino patrons – than upper class Filipinos, who often excel at betrayal or simply watching people fall. Being in the same fraternity as Makoy did not help Ninoy, being a Mason like Aguinaldo did not help Heneral Luna or Bonifacio. It is Game of Thrones.
Marcos Sr. and Imelda were both fantastic liars but somehow swayed a nation towards their lies despite the lies being so easily disproven. Once he claimed he personally received the Medal of Honor from the President of the United States, though he spent most of WWII out of combat and only rose to being a major from third lieutenant as a favor to his father, AFAIK. There are some who told me even recently that Marcos Sr. was a member of the Illuminati, and therefore Marcos Jr. also has the same “connections.”
There’s an apt Bisaya word “gaba” that describes negative karma, but is mostly used for people wishing their rivals or enemies to fall. I think nowadays after decades of Visayan migration to MM, gaba has been introduced into the general lexicon and used by younger generations of Tagalogs as well.
Speaking of, if you recall in Game of Thrones even the idealistic Daenerys in the end fell to more base human instincts and destroyed herself and everyone else around her. This is how I feel about Filipino politics in general. Every decent seeming leader either got assassinated, died in accidents, or turned to base instincts once they tasted power. Even Miriam Defensor-Santiago, who some thought would be the game changer President, was only raised to that level of reverence by disillusioned Duterte supporters midway through his Presidency. I personally remember Defensor-Santiago as a complicated person who had worryingly authoritarian tendencies.
Often, the topic is people, even among Pinks. After years on Twitter, seeing how the daily buzz in the National Village leads to little, I often mute even FB pages.
Yes. People are the subjects, either critical to be critical or praise to be a part of the glory, in the man, seldom striving to grasp the contexts or the lessons. That’s why pole vaulters and musicians go elsewhere for emotional and financial support. Few here grasp or admire the dedication. They are waiting for the success or the failure. And it’s why politicians succeed as populists and fail as thinkers and givers.
Yep, in such a culture falling from a motorbike once counts more than all the hard work done otherwise. Missing a note just once negates years of masterful singing for the public.
Some Filipinos mocked SB19 for practicing their iconic Go Up dance 1000 times, I was told.
This mentality reminds me of how Marcos Sr. painstakingly took efforts to paint himself as a natural genius, a once in a lifetime prophet-leader. Eventually, I think he fell into his own self-assurance. There seems to be many echoes of this mentality across generalized Filipino culture. There is no respect for hard workers. I’ve heard the “hard work is useless” many times. Diskarte wins the day, even if the one who thinks he has diskarte ultimately fell flat on his face. As long as he jumps straight up and continues the showboating, he’s a winner in the eyes of others.
https://joeam.com/2023/04/24/who-really-knows-the-philippines/ was my article on how we in Manila used to know little outside Luzon, at most. If one were to draw a picture similar to the iconic The New Yorker for Metro Manilans in the 1970s, it would have Mindanao very far away as Terra Incognita with strange beasts, and Visayas would be just Cebu, Iloilo and Leyte, maybe San Juanico bridge. I have seen satirical maps of Metro Manila by Filipino Gen Zs showing QC as a place where f-bois live. In the 1970s, it was home to the jeprox. But that’s another story.
Since my early Filipino friends were Tagalogs, my early visits saw me confined to Luzon as well, specially around NCR or Batangas. Even in the late 1990s, going up north to Tarlac and Ilocos meeting Kapampangans and Ilokanos felt like entering an entirely different world. My 20s and most of my 30s consisted of a lagalag lifestyle of a global bagamundo of travel interjected by frenetic months of work.
I settled on Cebu and the Visayas as usual haunts since things seemed a lot slower and emotionally connected there compared to Manila with her facelessness, but now even there things are changing. Even Mindanao I’ve seen a lot of, including places Filipinos tell me not to visit with looks of fear in their eyes. Imagine the blood draining from their faces when I recounted my forays in Sulu and Tawi Tawi with the Tausug…
All throughout, I’ve realized that the different regions are still quite Balkanized in both culture and daily life. Even in now-Bisaya heavily influenced Mindanao, things seem different from the other Visayan cultural capitals in Cebu, Tacloban, Ilo Ilo. There are two strains of thought I’ve observed in the Philippines. One of hyper-international in the metros of Manila and Cebu, the other decidedly local and seemingly stuck in time where not much seems changed from the colonial periods.
I had not really put a lot of thought about the existence of a “deep state” in any country until now because it is often bandied around by right wing extremists and certifiably weird people. Urban myths are packaged as truth and spread as propaganda. The Pizzagate during the US 2016 election is a prime example (deep state actors, supposedly include Hillary and Soros, meet at a pizza parlor to abuse children). As recent as last week, Roseanne Barr was talking about the liberal deep state populated by “full-on vampires” who drink blood and eat babies. Not to mention Trump and Vance’s “immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats and dogs” spiel.
Under the definition that a deep state is an undemocratic non-governmental power structure embedded into most countries with democratic form of government, I agree that US as well as PH have deep state issues. Joey’s “entryism” as an infiltration to subvert and/or influence groups that otherwise are hostile to the entryist’s ideals is definitely a deep state component. Joe presents deep state as the presence of undemocratic behavior and actions in PH governmental institutions to keep the masses from making headway towards a more democratic and progressive country: funding and election of dynasts and ne’er-do-wells, complicated, arduous and bureaucratic administrative processes, the band-aid solution to chronic problems, religious establishments and law enforcers’ interference, and the miseducation of Filipinos to name a few.
The question is how can the PH deep state be uprooted? Here are some suggestions: Public naming, shaming and prosecution of bad actors, masses’ continuous and vociferous call for reforms and the strengthening of political parties, state institutions and public education. Easier said than done but definitely doable with bolder, active and assertive masses.
“The Pizzagate during the US 2016 election is a prime example (deep state actors, supposedly include Hillary and Soros, meet at a pizza parlor to abuse children).” I think the best representation of Deep State stuff is in the UFO cover-ups (whether alien or DARPA) then the P. Diddy/Epstein stuff, but farther back it was JKF assassination, JP (though that stuff is more related to the UFO cover-ups). the P. Diddy/Epstein stuff I would throw into the Bohemian Grove crowd. basically the sharing of vices to ensure secrets are kept. thus I put more effort in the UFO stuff cuz that’s more about power wielding, and not just blackmail. But sure the two might converge too i dunno. it’ll be hard to root out, cuz its too deep. some would even take this further to Medicis and Jews and banks etc. or even farther like Knight Templars or Browns Da Vinci code etc. too far down the rabbit hole for me, so the shallow end for me is the UFOs stuff. but keep an eye on Diddy cuz I gotta feeling he’ll be another Epstein in prison. How the Deep State is expressed in the Philippines I think is in the movement of corporations (many of which may have connections all the way to the Knights Templars) this is Neal Stephenson‘s specialty eg. where technology originates. Joe’s read him. so these kangaroo proceedings is just distractions. thus the new development of IMEE/LENI/SARA team up is interesting. but still unclear.
YouTube just showed me this video about a Filipino who became a Knight Templar, though I would rather believe it is the algorithm, not the Illuminati:
The real Illuminati were a Bavarian group to which Mozart may have belonged, as his Magic Flute opera has symbolism, his native Salzburg was close to Bavaria and he had beef with his former patron, the Salzburg Archbishop. Count Montgelas, THE modernizer of Bavaria, was a former Illuminatus. These men believed in Enlightenment but expressed it in a cultic way, not surprising as they mostly came from a land of believers, Bavaria.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati
This place still has diehard believers in the theory that “Mad King Ludwig” was assassinated by the Prussians to fully annex Bavaria, or loyal followers of the late Prime Minister Franz-Josef Strauss. I met some in 2003 at the Oktoberfest when they were commemorating his 15th death anniversary. Austrians and Bavarians give a good funeral a lot of importance. There are also diehard Michael Jackson fans here who keep putting pictures of him and flowers under the statue of Orlando di Lasso, not far from the statue of.. Montgelas HIMSELF. Coincidence?
I am more of a believer in Occam’s razor, taking the most likely explanation. Definitely, most Philippine revolutionaries were freemasons, and most probably, the triangle in the Philippine flag is a result of that. Sure, male bonding groups exist among the powerful since forever.
That they can hold up conspiracies over generations is unlikely, though. I tend to believe Joey, who wrote that in the hood, not even gangsters can keep secrets. It is more like groups constantly reconfiguring alliances. A danger for the very linked Philippine elite is inbreeding. Possibly, they need to marry more actresses and actors but beware of bad actors (c) JPilipinas as they will not entertain the people well. Check out what happened to the Spanish Habsburgs and why the War of Spanish Succession started to see what inbreeding can cause.
When in doubt, I always adopt the view of Occam’s Razor. The most simple explanation is usually the correct one. The global pandemic lockdowns created a surge of new conspiracy theory fans as people get sucked deeper into rabbit holes on YouTube, such as my close kuya friend since childhood (a former gangster btw). But his conspiratorial leaning actually didn’t start on YouTube, it was through a life crisis that led him to start listening to born again pastors on the radio. It’s no coincidence that there is an intertwining web of born again/charismatic Christians and conspiracy theorists.
A lot of modern conspiracy theories are just rehashings of conspiracy theories that developed in the Middle Ages among the common masses. The masses, unable to direct their resentment and anger towards their lords, found dark and nefarious “enemies” to which they directed their animosity. Of course this usually meant “the Jews,” the age-old culprit despite their numerical inferiority as a people. Sometimes conspiracy theories included other marginalized groups such as Gypsies, and also married the belief in the mystical and religious with folk beliefs. It’s interesting to connect the spread of conspiratorial ideas about the Illuminati to the Knights Templar wherein the original, and usually dead groups were transformed into shadowy puppetmasters. But of course upon more investigation, one can see that the Illuminati espoused Enlightenment ideas that clashed with Late Medieval beliefs, and the Templars being a formerly powerful Catholic military order was no longer useful to Christian kings who wanted to take control of the Holy Land themselves.
It can be said that every conspiracy theory has a seed of truth within it. The most believable stories do. But I find it hard to believe that increasingly complex webs of shadow control is possible, when human nature is to share stories, to boast even. Two common gangsters can’t keep their mouths shut. Entire mafia organizations were brought down due to the boasting of members.
“I tend to believe Joey, who wrote that in the hood, not even gangsters can keep secrets.”
“Two common gangsters can’t keep their mouths shut. Entire mafia organizations were brought down due to the boasting of members.”
this is one of those how do you prove a negative dilemmas. Ireneo and Joey, if you chose gangs and mafias as analogy. i tend to agree. because of what those endeavors incentivize plus the state that acts upon it via courts and cops. but even within street gangs there is a hierarchy in how they organize. some are run by families, some by cohorts, some are run directly by corporate office, eg. prison gang (lets say the Mexican Mafia). still there are gangs in Socal that don’t answer to corporate they are tax free (which they proudly proclaim). theres gangs in the LA area that don’t get in trouble from the Maxican Mafia la Eme (which originated in East LA but now California even nation wide) nor the police (they’ve successfully infiltrated local gov’t). and so long as they don’t get out of hand they’re generally left alone by la Eme and local gov’t. so my point is that secrecy tends to go hand in hand with how well an organization coalesces and its culture if they can reach into their history.
So expand that to federal gov’t (even corporations) and there are lots of secrets to come out either thru leaks or courts, but you get the sense that its just the tip of the ice berg. So no I don’t think every secret shared by people have to come out and be divulged. take for instance the waterboarding infrastructure, well that was more than just waterboarding it was a whole logistical endeavor. nothing will ever come out of that project because of two reasons the people that did it really believed in said project (love) and they realise they can get in trouble legally if they divulge (hate, eg. people outside of it hate it wanna make examples of them). you’ll never hear leaks because all evidence have been burned so its like the thing never happened. and why the only guy that went to prison was ironically the whistlblower of said program who wasn’t technically ever part of it. so when the gov’t wants to keep things secret theres a lot of ways to ensure secrecy. what i’m saying is the norm is not to sing. sure you get the luxury of knowledge when they do sing, but the conceit of saying that song is 100% all of it is naive.
To connect it to Joe’s current blog, this is what I think is going on. and why Imee, Leni and Sara are moving towards each other. Now the question should be does China have a deep state, and I think its not very deep, its just the CCP. Which means IMEE LENI SARA if they go thru with what I think they are planning are either gonna end up like those 3 jokers below, or they’ll give the US Deep (deeper?) State an offer they can’t refuse. that’s why I’m excited how this will all play out. but I think these 3 women all like 10 years apart with their own style and strengths will andcan pull it off. we’ll see.
Oh no LCpl, my usage of gangs as an example is to illustrate that those who try to form actual criminal conspiracies are not as smart as they think they are. That’s why they always get caught up with the law in which each individual lawman might be not as smart, but the law has time and patience. A lot of times gangs bring themselves down due to paranoia and in-fighting, which is the crack that usually allows the entire organization to be brought down.
I think expanding the gang concept to the US federal government and corporations to be a bit of stretch though; that’s not where I was going with my analogy hehe. But as I shared, conspiracy theory researchers have observed that conspiracy theories often contain a nugget of truth that forms the basis. That small kernel of truth is what makes conspiracy theories more believable. There are some concepts in psychology and neuroscience that addresses this human tendency:
1.) One of the human cognitive superpowers is pattern recognition. This allows humans to use mental shortcuts to quickly match new information from external stimuli with information we already know in memory. The mental shortcuts save mental capacity, which saves calories. As the human brain consumes the most calories of all organs, this strategy allowed humans to succeed during lean food years in the ancient past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_recognition_(psychology)
2.) Pattern recognition uses the strategy of thin-slicing, which was first described in the 1990s. Thin-slicing is the ability to find patterns (to “connect the dots”) in thin slices, or narrow windows of experience. A common example is firemen making “split-second” decisions or policemen knowing something is wrong due to “gut feeling,” both scenarios of which depend on sparse inputs as there is no time to gather more detailed information. This has led to thin-slicing’s association with the Pareto principle (“80/20 rule”), which describes that 80% of outcomes have a causation in 20% of inputs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin-slicing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
3.) The famous psychiatrist Carl Jung developed an early theory of psychology called synchronicity, which states that events that happen around roughly the same time tend to appear to humans are being related, yet lack a provable causal connection (causality).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
4.) Which brings me to the last concept apophenia, describes the human tendency to unreasonably seek definitive patterns in random information by perceiving meaningful connections between unrelated things. A common example is the gambler’s fallacy, which is the belief that less frequent events are likely to happen in the near future (which causes gambling addicts to keep playing hoping to win “the next time”). Conspiracy theories typically include varying elements of apophenia as coincidences are connected together into a nefarious plot that only the conspiracy theorist can see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
These concepts are why I previously said that not everything necessarily needs to be connected. It could both be true that a.) the CIA conducted waterboarding to attempt to extract operational intelligence from alleged terrorists during the early GWOT, b.) the CIA had acted unlawfully due to human emotion (anger over 9/11 attacks) overtaking reason, and the illegal practices were addressed with the legal apparatus when found out. The waterboarding was found out when personnel started sharing photographs of waterboarding victims being waterboarded, which goes back to humans often being unable to withhold boasting which then breaks the secrecy.
Your illustration made me smile to be honest, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch and I’m not willing to go down that rabbit hole haha.
Joey, more than two links in a comment sends it to moderation.
Ah, good to know this. Thanks Joe!
Joey, thanks for the clarification. “That small kernel of truth is what makes conspiracy theories more believable. “ Okay, let’s test out the nugget. but the nugget we’ll use is the Tictac UFO video off San Diego. fighter pilots chased it, radar technicians followed it, supposedly there better quality videos but not disclosed. according to all witnesses (military) it was behaving outside of known physics. then theres cover-up, whenever gov’t and media try to ask farther they’re stonewalled. what do you think is behind that stonewall?
“overtaking reason, and the illegal practices were addressed with the legal apparatus when found out. “ If you’re talking about Abu Ghraib 2003, I ‘m pretty sure the whole project just went underground deeper but it continued. it even was hinted in Zero Dark Thirty
Zero Dark Thirty is a fictional film LCpl. It was loosely based on known things at the the time, but the film is very much a dramatization which took liberties with the truth 😅
That’s true too. But the urban legend of that film was that actual people involved consulted on the film. and (although this part no one can prove) that waterboarding was instrumental in getting bin Laden. My point though is that it continued. this says 2009, https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/12/01/no-more-excuses/roadmap-justice-cia-torture but i’m thinking they just out sourced it too.
Well that would be good marketing to say some secretive former operatives consulted. Hollywood marketing at its best hehe.
Bin Laden wasn’t gotten due to waterboarding. Bin Laden was gotten due to good old HUMINT after the CIA found out that he may be in the Pakistan compound. Then the CIA tracked down his errand runner to sneak in compromised USB drives (which is how Bin Laden was communicating with Al Qaeda). Once confirmed the SEALs took him out.
“Bin Laden was gotten due to good old HUMINT after the CIA found out that he may be in the Pakistan compound. “ That’s why there was such hoopla when they had that scene in Zero Dark Thirty cuz they really didn’t have to have it, but I think the consultants wanted to push back on the importance of their work, and that waterboarding did work. thus it was added in. that HUMINT part was retconned to ensure no legal issues. they sanitized waterboarding, but like that list you shared of why things surface, consultants gave Hollywood a nugget and Hollywood ran with it. IMHO, kernel. remember in the movie they never were 100% and in Area 51 the Navy SEALs were like I’m 100% cuz of her. pointing to Jessica Chastain.
ps. actually maybe not consultants but says here Hollywood producers wined and dined CIA folks: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/the-wining-and-dining-behind-zero-dark-thirty/404536/
Personally my opinion is if “CIA” agents gave up insider, national security information so easily over wining and dining, then they either are not very good CIA agents, or they were very low level junior staffers (not necessarily agents) who heard a story from someone who heard a story from someone else.
Zero Dark Thirty was an entertaining movie. I don’t consider any of it based on fact. Even the so-called point man SEAL who “shot” bin Laden in the head was ridiculed and ostracized by his SEAL brothers for showboating and self-aggrandizing when he sold his story.
Joey, was Googling some more on this, and found this article. maybe not like Zero Dark Thirty but for sure they include waterboarding as essential to discovery of bin Laden:
“There is no doubt that information provided by the totality of detainees in CIA custody, those who were subjected to interrogation and those who were not, was essential to bringing bin Laden to justice. The CIA never would have focused on the individual who turned out to be bin Laden’s personal courier without the detention and interrogation program.
Specifically, information developed in the interrogation program piqued the CIA’s interest in the courier, placing him at the top of the list of leads to bin Laden. A detainee subjected to interrogation provided the most specific information on the courier.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-interrogations-saved-lives-1418142644
so basically Zero Dark Thirty was correct.
“So the bottom line is this: The interrogation program formed an essential part of the foundation from which the CIA and the U.S. military mounted the bin Laden operation.”
ps. – I ‘d not read this article op ed ever, but I do remember watching some video on youtube saying Zero Dark Thirty and that waterboarding scene was accurate. why I mentioned Zero Dark Thirty.
Ah I generally don’t watch YouTube videos unless it’s by an actual expert, and even then only rarely. I prefer the written word. There are too many randos on YouTube and Twitter, some who push misinformation for clicks/ad money or worse, foreign disinfo.
I read the entire Michael Hayden op-ed you linked, and no where did Fmr. CIA Dir. Hayden assert that waterboarding (or the other “enhanced interrogation techniques”) specifically was the effective interrogation method used. In fact it was Dir. Hayden that requested in 2007 that waterboarding be banned from use:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN14236014/
Dir. Hayden had testified to Congress in 2008 that only three terrorists were waterboarded and that waterboarding was not a widespread practice. The three terrorists who were waterboarded are: Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Out of these three, Hayden’s op-ed only states KSM as being one of the “useful intelligence sources,” with the other terrorist not having been waterboarded.
Let’s not connect the dots with tidbits of information that are not connected haha.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/12/09/369646177/torture-report-did-harsh-interrogations-help-catch-osama-bin-laden
“One of the big arguments the Central Intelligence Agency has used to defend its enhanced interrogation techniques is that information stemming from those interrogations led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.
More specifically, officials have argued that those types of questionings led to important information about Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, the courier that led the U.S. to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.”
Some also say it was via SIGINT, Joey. but HUMINT is more unlikely. so has to be via the detention (then interrogation whether enhanced or not). “national security information so easily over wining and dining, “ they weren’t giving up national security, Joey, it was more like pride. to set the record straight. that amidst the no torture legal climate. it was in fact torture that eventually captured bin Laden. now sure Zero Dark Thirty and WSJ op ed are essentially leaks, but they both are trying to say it wasn’t SIGINT and it wasn’t thru HUMINT. it was thru interrogation. again whether enhanced or not, I don’t think that’s something they’ll want to divulge cuz legal issues. but my bigger point is it continued. persisted. probably stopped after bin Laden but I gotta feeling it persisted just hidden, eg kept away from FBI, courts, but the information garnered is set apart from SIGINT and HUMINT. thus the leaks. they want to set the record straight but not completely come out.
I have my own theories on the UFO incidents (or UAP as they are known now officially). One theory is that recent UAPs are advanced American tech being tested against our own systems, just like the Cold War UFOs ended up being secret assets like the U-2, SR-71, F-117, B-2, and the other prototype projects. In a compartmentalized “need to know” system of government secrets, official military would not “need to know” such projects exist. The other theory is the UAPs are advanced Russian or Chinese tech, which I find hard to believe as the Russians are decades behind on conventional jet engine tech, and the Chinese are even more behind as they copy Russian designs. So it would be hard for me to conclude the UAPs are foreign enemy assets. As for UAPs being actually ETs, I also find that hard to believe. Just look at how us humans act when we encounter “undiscovered” human cultures. We wiped them out. It’s not hard to think that a vastly superior ET force would not do the same to humans if they ever reached Earth.
“So it would be hard for me to conclude the UAPs are foreign enemy assets. “ Me too.
“We wiped them out. It’s not hard to think that a vastly superior ET force would not do the same to humans if they ever reached Earth.” I think here, you’re thinking like a human, Joey. I don’t know the answer myself. hence the interest. but if these things are ours, that’s the deep state portion of this I’m entertaining. If ETs are infact nonhuman, that opens up a myriad of possibilities in which we shouldn’t be transposing human history human behaviour. but if it is indeed human, then your caveat for wiping people off applies. cuz if that TicTac is ours then technologically speaking we are already a century or so ahead. so who’s hiding this? and why?
Tic Tac is an alien war tool, the vehicle through which an intelligent species is degraded and lives only to devour itself. I’m shifting to your side on this. Certainly aliens would have their own ways to deal with infestations. We likely look a lot like herpes to them.
Who’s hiding this and why: The government of course, because their duty is to the Constitution, not to tell-all when our enemies are listening.
Allow me to draw a rough example of the Cold War:
1.) In 1955 American observers embedded in Moscow watched the then brand new M-4 jet bomber fly over Red Square in an air parade. The Soviets had only managed to build 28 M-4 bombers, but flew them in a loop leading the US to believe the Soviets literally did a flyover of 800+ bombers. The US completely flipped out and thus started the “bomber gap,” which resulted in the US developing an overwhelming bomber fleet for SAC (B-47 and B-52 mostly) of nearly 3,000 bombers. The M-4 ended up being a dud, and the most advanced mainstream Soviet bomber to this day was the Tu-95, which is an enlarged and modernized version of the Tu-4, a copy of the WWII era American B-24 piston engined bomber.
2.) In 1964 the US observed the MiG-25 fighter, which due to its size and very large engines, Americans assumed it was a super fighter that would be superior to US designs which at the time consisted of the F-4 Phantom. This caused the US to fear the “fighter gap” and resulted in the F-14, F-15, F-16, F-18 series fighters all of which have overwhelming superiority over even modern Russian designs. The US also built like a combined total of 5,000 fighters, not including the ones built for allies. The MiG-25 was found out to be a slow and heavy interceptor after one defected to the US via Japan, not a super fighter.
3.) In the 1980s, Reagan’s famous “Star Wars” fever dream of space based weapons caused the reverse reaction in the Soviet Union. The USSR tried to increase spending so much that their fragile planned economy collapsed, and the Soviet Union along with it. The US never built Star Wars lol.
4.) The F-117 “Stealth Fighter” was developed in prototype form from 1974 by DARPA and not publicly unveiled until 1988, and only then was partially unveiled by Reagan who had slipped up in a boast before catching himself.
5.) The U-2 was developed in the early 1950s and was not acknowledged until 1960, when Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union.
On Tic-Tac, we need to consider that the UAP probably is unmanned. Material science can create airframes that survive 15G+ but humans can only survive until 4-5G. An unmanned platform possibly explains many things about the erratic behavior of the UAPs.
I’m not transposing human history and behavior on theoretical ETs. It’s more of a matter of resources. Human “explorers” sought out new lands due to lack of resources in their own, and promptly enslaved or exterminated the natives. Cortes took the entirety of Mexico with a force of just 500 soldiers and 100 marines, wiping out or subjugating 12 million people. The Spanish did a similar thing in the Philippines and South America. If we think about it, an organism doesn’t have any reason to migrate to an unknown place if its current resources are sufficient. Even animals down to single-celled organisms will compete for resources, often violently. It would probably be no different for a theoretical ET that has come from a distant star seeking new resources.
Like bugs, we are.
“We likely look a lot like herpes to them.” Or mere dust bunnies.
Well… the Spanish gave the native Americans smallpox and herpes, and they gave the Spanish syphilis…
“On Tic-Tac, we need to consider that the UAP probably is unmanned. Material science can create airframes that survive 15G+ but humans can only survive until 4-5G. An unmanned platform possibly explains many things about the erratic behavior of the UAPs.” this is a good point, the pilots saw the Tictac disappear but the radar guys saw them pop in and pop out.
Sure, if military personnel with security clearances don’t know, then civilians definitely don’t know. The highest levels of US government operate on compartmentalized security as pertains to national security. The people who know compromise of highly trusted people, including the President and a small group of Senators and Congressmen in the relevant committees. Even Truman didn’t know about the Manhattan Project while he was VP. He was only clued in when FDR died and he became President.
Fighter pilots and radar operators, as highly trained as they are, only know what they are trained on. It’s natural for them to not understand something they’re not familiar with in terms of advanced technology that DARPA is involved in.
In terms of disappearing and reappearing in the visible spectrum, the Soviets did early experiments on light bending back in the 1980s I believe. It’s the basis of the Russian take on stealth tech since they couldn’t get radar absorbency right. The Russians also haven’t gotten light bending right. Both light and radar are forms of electromagnetic radiation, so it would be plausible that technology can be similar. By the way, DARPA publicly said they are developing light bending stealth as far as the late 1990s. The US has a history of appropriating Soviet scientific papers and developing the theory to completion, whereas the Russians were limited by technological ability, though their scientists are too notch. Too bad most Soviet scientists were Ukrainian…
https://www.extremetech.com/defense/206432-darpa-laser-scanning-bending-light-with-a-microchip
Here’s another Hollywood connection, but this time UFOs. Kurt Russell was flying in at the time Phoenix was seeing those lights which was actually a mothership sized UFO 1997,
Kurt Russell is well known as a conspiratorial crank in Hollywood. Come on, a city sized mothership appeared over Phoenix and only he noticed it? 😅
Not just Kurt Russell but Alice Cooper too saw the same thing but he was on the road outside of Phoenix, Joe. same exact event.
*Joey
ooooops, my bad, Joey. just watched it again. Alice Cooper’s actually saying he’s seeing this in 2000, “3 years ” after the Phoenix lights incident, the one Kurt Russell witnessed. but he’s saying its the same exact thing but seeing it closer to Blythe but heading towards southwest like to San Diego.
What people who witnesses these events (“Phoenix Lights” or similar) often fail to connect, or don’t want to connect, is the Phoenix Lights and similar events happened nearby military installations during publicly announced military exercises. See the problem is that the Phoenix Lights recaptured popular imagination during the 1990s when conspiracy theories were “mainstream.” Let’s take the Phoenix Lights phenomenon. Most witnesses stated they saw a V-shaped pattern of around 5 very bright lights that were “falling” slowly in the sky. Yet in a pre-online world, publications such as USA Today re-imagined the witness reports by drawing in the “V-shape” into an alleged giant craft in the air, when none of the original witnesses had reported that. People then ran wild with the illustrations and then assumed witnesses had in fact seen a giant V-shaped alien mothership. When collective psychosis takes hold, people start hallucinating similar events. A lot of these things have simple explanations through Occam’s Razor.
I often recall FBI Special Agent Dana Scully’s famous words:
“The truth is out there, but so are lies.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights
That wiki looks like its been vandalized with just the flairs theory, it used to be balanced. but the position of the flairs to the south was not what the witnesses were describing of the V moving from north to south of Phoenix. And i dunno if youve tracked this Phoenix lights from the beginning but I ‘ve been following this since the beginning in the news in 1997. the original witnesses prior to the flairs did report V. the flairs came later as explanation. but the event was already reported with said V. AZ governor at that time was also a witness (theres also original news interviews online preceding the flairs but I’ll stop here, Joey, and try to make all this into a blog per Joe’s suggestion) “aircraft carrier in the sky” was the AZ governor’s description:
I also followed the Phoenix Lights at the time. “Vandalized” would be a strong word to use on the wiki, as the more prominent a wiki page is the more editorial scrutiny it has. Usually only rarely accessed wikis get vandalized, which doesn’t seem the case from this wiki’s edit history.
How I see these reported phenomena is that the government and investigators have provided sufficient evidence and explanations, and those who “believe” what they “saw” have provided no conclusive evidence, and the theory keeps getting wilder as time goes on. Which is the exact issue with conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are about feelings, not concrete evidence since evidence doesn’t matter in a conspiracy theory. That being said, if people want to believe those things and it doesn’t harm others, then why not? Everyone is entitled to their feelings 😅
Joey, as a litmus test what do you think about the Virgin of Fatima event? I learned about Fatima from sonny. and Lourdes and Guadalupe. Occam’s razor apply there too? cuz that has a time element which was in fact the miracle.
I’ve completed the pilgrimage circuit of the major Marian shrines a few times, including those sites. To answer your question: I’m not sure how spiritual beliefs and physical explanations necessary need to mix. In many cases, the two realms are entirely different.
See the problem with comparing this or the other to the application of Occam’s Razor is that Occam’s Razor boils down to “keep things simple.” Miracles by nature and as described are quite simple. Conspiracy theories on the other hand, tend to develop more and more complexity over time to explain away gaps in logic. Making things more complicated is the opposite of Occam’s Razor 😅
So regarding the flairs. That red star is where the flairs were dropped. A-10s out of Monthan AFB (in Tucson, AZ) were dropping flairs as part of some annual training. Luke AFB had no training that night. The green arrows represent witnesses looking west. now sure they could’ve seen the flairs same direction. the former Governor would’ve been looking at this direction, Joey. but the times don’t match, his description (like others) was that this event happened around 8 to 9pm. whereas the flairs as indicated by the A-10 unit who dropped it indicated 10 to 11pm. and there are videos that support the flairs being dropped at this time. then there are yellow arrow witnesses who were looking to the east, who would not have seen the flairs (opposite direction). the blue arrows indicate the looking up perspective reported by witnesses, including Kurt Russell who was looking down. but in the same path. these are witnesses with more description as i’ve already shared. I’ll stop here. just wanted to offer clarification on flairs.
” I’m not sure how spiritual beliefs and physical explanations necessary need to mix. In many cases, the two realms are entirely different.” I don’t think so, Joey. and I’ll go into detail on this in the coming blog.
“Miracles by nature and as described are quite simple. Conspiracy theories on the other hand, tend to develop more and more complexity over time to explain away gaps in logic. “ But in determining that they are in fact miracles, Joey. well that requires conspiracy, for people to agree on a plot. eg. that it was in fact Mary in Fatima, in Lourdes, in Guadalupe and lastly in Penafrancia. that requires conspiracy theory, a theory agreed upon by few or many people to explain an event both natural and supernatural. miracles in and of itself, sure I agree, like the sun rising in the east to me is a miracle, setting in the west too. its no blow your mind miracles, but if you imagine we’re spinning around the galaxy and still not hit anything. it qualifies. but I don’t need to inject any meaning into that event. just recognize it as such, Joey. Marian shrines though, apart from the events, you are in fact injecting meaning. weakness of said meaning or agreed upon plot is that it was in fact Mary. the question has to be are there beings so powerful that they can produce miracles and impersonate known gods that humans already recognize. my question to you Joey, is how do you know it was Mary in the instances mentioned? and if there wasn’t a conspiracy of people namely Catholics agreeing upon said story agreeing upon a theory, like for instance lets say evidence is uncovered that in fact it was someone or something else impersonating as Mary (this part is thought experiment), how would you create meaning then? my point here is just to say it’s all conspiracy theory, Joey. stories people agree upon.
Well, I think you are hallucinating about Robredo. But I think your point that secrets can be kept, and are being kept, is correct. And that is generally an important part of effective deep state (good sense of the term, not MAGA) operations and integrity. The point about China not having a deep state is fascinating, and I’m inclined to agree. One man’s ego has overpowered all checks and balances and administrative constancy. I’m reminded of a video of them physically yanking one old guy out of his chair in that big auditorium filled with important commies. They all sat there obediently watching. So ruthless.
“Well, I think you are hallucinating about Robredo. “ LOL. i had to stick that in there, cuz I ended up making a new graph vis a vis deep state US and deep state Philippines. but I concede that IMEE LENI SARA is all mine. and I may be wrong.
The old guy happened to be the Hu Jintao, Xi Jingping’s immediate predecessor. In countries with East Asian models of social propriety (China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore) this would be considered a huge faux pas to abuse an elder this way. It has been theorized that China lost a lot of her culture and values in the Cultural Revolution that saw countless educated people, teachers, professors, religious leaders all who have a role in maintaining cultural values being purged (many times simply worked to death on collectives). The Cultural Revolution Mao’s coverup of his earlier failures that culminated in managing to kill more people than Hitler ever did through the Chinese famine. Communist Party rivals started grumbling, so he just killed them all. Xi Jingping’s consolidation of power is a bringing back of the old gangster attitude of Mao (his personal hero).
Ah, thanks for the info. On reflection, as a monarch is a deep state organization, so is an enduring dictatorship that protects itself through its routines of obedience. The aberration for China was the brief period of international conciliation, as Gorbachev was the exception for Russia, which is back to Czar Putin.
It might be more precise to describe the People’s Republic of China under Xi to be a mafia state with just a fig leaf similarity with Mao’s authoritarian personal rule. Last year the great investigative journalism outfit ProPublica did a deep investigative report on what many Chinese dissidents had been saying for years since Xi took power:
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-beijing-chinese-mafia-europe-protect-interests
While the officially “communist” system implies communism in the Cold War definition, the PRC is only communist in name only. It’s more like a collection of city and provincial party leaders who take directives from the top but are usually left to their own devices, as the PRC had never adopted the Soviet-style command structure of micromanagement. Under Xi, the leftover reformers under Zhao, Jiang and Hu were accused of personal corruption and “disappeared,” along with their acolytes. After this crackdown, the various factions in the CCP were destroyed, especially those who had a Westward view of engagement with the West. In their place Xi installed loyalists from his own faction.
Xi was the son of a Mao-era senior cadre who had been one of the many cadres made to take the fall for Mao’s excesses and failures during the Cultural Revolution. Xi’s youthful delinquency has been well documented and there had been allegations that he had spent time with the Triads. So it’s no surprise that once Xi removed the other factions, he installed his own allies as provincial and city heads who also had allegations of being close to Chinese mafia.
It has been observed that Xi isn’t interested in leading, being more focused on the personal accumulation of power. So everything worked out great as the export economy transitioned into domestic development through mostly consumerism and real estate. Building domestic real estate brought many jobs, which kept the population happy as most Chinese are agnostic politically and accept the CCP as long as they can earn. Sometime in the late 2010s, the real estate market started to become saturated. Highrises were built with shoddy materials and no one lived in them (the so-called “ghost cities”). I’ve seen those ghost cities myself, and compared to American skyscrapers that have lasted nearly a century, the unoccupied Chinese ghost cities seemed to start crumbling after not even a decade. It was and is still common for local cadres to have “clean hands,” but direct state funds towards family or friend owned construction businesses, which then mixed more sand into the concrete mixture. Some skyscrapers fell down by themselves, other ghost cities were demolished wholesale and then rebuilt (still unoccuppied), while school buildings collapsed during minor earthquakes. Corruption is accepted, even encouraged under Xi, with cadres regularly skimming off the top; cadres only get punished if they skim a bit too much and make the party and thus Xi look bad through collapsing buildings. The new Chinese middle class are encouraged to “invest” in new apartment skyscrapers to keep money within the domestic system since 2005, but never lived in them. This real estate investment turned out to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme so that CCP cadres can skim some more. Real estate and personal savings started collapsing in 2020 with the Evergrande liquidity crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis_(2020%E2%80%93present)
Not coincidentally, historians have observed throughout time that nations attempt to use nationalism and begin to be more outwardly belligerent when the domestic arena is reaching a boiling point. This is possibly one of the factors for China to become much more belligerent versus maritime neighbors such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam. The Philippines particularly is singled out since the CCP probably sees the Philippines as the “weakest link” that cannot defend herself. Note how even Taiwan doesn’t receive the same amount of aggression from China as the Philippines does.
Of course, nationalism can spill over into open war. While I don’t believe Xi is stupid enough to start WW III as that would stop his mafia empire, he has now fed the CCP nationalists for nearly 2 decades and they have reached a fever pitch. The PLA is untested in war, having received a decisive bloody nose in their last foreign adventure in 1979 when they invaded newly unified communist Vietnam.
Putin’s Russia has followed a similar track, where it is often described as a terrorist state in addition to a mafia state. Of course it is well known that Putin cavorted with the St. Petersburg faction of the Russian mafia during the Yeltsin period following the USSR’s collapse.
What a way to run a nation. So dysfunctional and tragic.
What’s surprising that middle class Chinese who can afford to do so are now showing up on the US Southern Border asking for political asylum. Who would have thought that would ever happen?
Step 1 has to be the awakening that popularity is not competence and who gets elected really does matter. I don’t know that the masses are even aware of how suppressed they are. Once they are aware, the nation will change.
The most ironic outcome of the Western right wing shouting about “deep state” (“deep state” is just another way of saying “the Jews”) from Poland to Hungary to the US, is that extreme right are the ones who actually tried to insert deep state actors into the system. Bad actors such as Kash Patel, John McEntee (who was my underclassman in high school), Stephen Miller, Jeffrey Clark, Richard Grenell, Steve Bannon, etc. etc. Project 2025 is the plan to replace the US federal apparatus with carbon copies of these loyalists in a form of right wing entryism. Of course these are the fever dreams that come out of think groups such as Heritage (which has astoundingly been writing down their plans for decades, since their founding by right wing billionaires).
In the Philippine context, I do appreciate Joe’s threading the narrative as it does apply, just in a different way. Generally I think American bureaucrats try to do right by their job, service to the nation, and follow the laws. Over in the Philippines, bureaucrats often act more like petty lords, or at least “representatives” of lords. Over time the American bureaucracy seems to be simplifying processes at the point of citizen interface, while Philippine bureaucracy seems to make more and more requirements that no one seems to know the purpose of. If Filipino bureaucrats emulate even a fraction of bureaucrats in other successful nations, I think it would be a huge improvement already.
I’m not sure if public shaming will really work JP. The level of kapal seems to only increase the more influence Filipinos in power have. Someone who is kapal cannot be shamed, since they are shameless. But if one were to transform the Philippine system of governance from the top-down rather than bottom-up, it probably would be helpful to have a President and Congresspeople who serve as a shining example to others. If the top-down approach is possible, then a just, fair and servant-President could use his/her direct control of the Executive branch and the accompanying apparatus to radically transform the top level national bureaucracy into one that serves the people rather than belittles people. This way, at the LGU level with province and municipality heads would be pressured to follow if the citizens sufficiently support such a project.
“Public naming, shaming and prosecution of bad actors, masses’ continuous and vociferous call for reforms and the strengthening of political parties, state institutions and public education.” JP, then you’ll like this BBC video. its only scratching the surface but the story of the 2 sisters fighting back is awesome.
So to connect this to Joe’s blog. UFO and Torture are things the public will never really fully understand. UFO (if man made) will be nat’l security, thus secret. but is that the only way to look at this. Torture will be a legal quicksand for those involved, so much will not be divulged. thus both have to be hidden. but we can use our minds to discern stuff. In the case of Torture. SIGINT people say the info came from them, maybe but in the actual finding of people and places, you’ll need HUMINT. so HUMINT, the clam was already closed not much new info coming from there. so detainees , not SIGINT not HUMINT, that s the most likely place. the only quibble now if it was the bad cop or the good cop that got the info. but its like the Lego Movie, they are the same guy. its the same process, Joey. so we have to lump ’em all the same. for UFOs, and I can share more incidents , if that’s okay with Joe, but its the technology themselves thats at issue. either captured via radar or video or by witness accounts especially the mass sightings variety. if as you’ve said its just secret programs, well all those you’ve listed operated within the laws of physics. they were jets sure more advanced but still jets. not so different from propellers. these things they are documenting are totally inexplicable to current physics. sure I agree could be man made but then if we go that route then we have to get into the implications of said technology say if we already have it why not expand it to others so people can benefit cuz thats just not a weapon that stuff can solve other problems as well. so in keeping with Joe’s blog, that’s how we have to approach issues that’s hidden from us. not just rely on info gathered by media but also be connecting dots in between lines. I think we’re pretty much done with the torture stuff, eg. good cop bad cop. But i feel UFOs will fruit more vis a vis deep state.
So this was the trajectory of that Phoenix lights UFO mothership sighting in 1997. same craft described with several witnesses they’ve pin pointed from various locations. with thousands from Phoenix area. the witnesses that said were directly below this craft described the light as glowing but not emanating light and in between the lights was a structure which some have described as solid while others translucent (like water). theres reports of 5 lights in V formation sometime 7 sometimes 9 with other lights either turning on or “docking” to the main structure. 1 to 2 miles was the size described.
this I think is the commonly agreed upon size of the craft. but if you’re looking up or from a distance without another actual object to compare it against, these distance and size guesstimations tend to be unreliable. so it could be bigger or smaller. but witnesses are describing bigger not smaller. plus the additional lights tacking on or turning on. but fighters were supposedly scrambled but nothing else came out of that. no official reports from Air Force. dead end.
FWIW I have around China Lake area seen something big (not 1 mile though) that was flanked by helicopters. at night. but I think it was more a dirigible type craft. not UFO. so I totally can see it could be dirigible. but the lights docking or tacking on, is weird to me.
addendum. that “V” shape looks flat like that but many witnesses have stated its more tubular in form. but this translucent or phasing in and out description like cloaking mechanism was out of whack that is the most interesting for me.
Might have been Voltes V, the Japanese secret weapon, see video:
Seriously, we have stuff like the Lilium jet flying over our skies here (video)
For blimp-like stuff, there was the aborted Zeppelin NT two decades ago.
When I was a child in the 1980s, I was fascinated by perpetual motion machines advertised in obscure mail order zines that were prevalent in those days. Most of the offered “secret” machines were actually just simple Sterling engines, which are definitely not 100% efficient or offer unlimited energy. “Unlimited energy” had by then been debunked for nearly 100 years due to not being able to pass the simple law of conservation. Despite this even to this day, “unlimited energy” is seen by conspiracy theorists as an example of the government keeping secrets that would benefit humanity. It’s often conflated with fusion energy, which is mathematically possible (and proven), yet is held back by expense current available material science.
The US government and other NATO countries have been studying Zeppelin-like semi-rigid dirigibles for the last 2 decades. The aim towards military application is of a second layer of military communication in the case satellite networks were taken out during wartime. Though, things seem to be moving towards high-altitude UAV gliders and balloons a la the Chinese spy balloons shot down over US and Canada in recent years. I’m sure these technologies have been fuel for new conspiracy theories by so-called “ufologists”.
So I guess on researching the Naga meeting, my youtube now thinks I like anything Philipppine politics. so it recommended this Alice Gou video of her speaking translating Chinese for that Chinese businessman cuz the real interpreter was out of the room taking a break. what struck me was how informal it was, lots of laughter and teasing the Chinese dude and teasing Alice Gou about her Chinese, etc. like kangaroo court.
On education and jobs. Many still think that we are not high tech enough for AI to kill a few jobs. On the education part. AI can help the students, I don’t know about the teachers.
If teachers had an internet connection and computer, they could start feeding student performance into a database that could be examined by AI for weaknesses in courses (too hard, too easy) and track students to be given assistance if they are falling behind or given a fast track to college if they excel. They could also receive student classroom assignments and lesson plans, or grade exams and essays if they can be scanned into the computer. When kids have computers, AI could do much much more. I’m writing a blog article on this now.
Awesome
What is killing us are the short cuts and loopholes to anything. laws, regulations,penalties, etc.
Good intentions really lead to perdition.
The loopholes protect the entitled.
Yes because looopholes are also the best friend of defense attorneys.
Mearsheimer and Sachs have become creatures of habit and refused to evolve in an evolving world, which is reflected in their smug approach. I often find that when one only interacts with like-minded individuals, group-think can quickly develop, wherein the orthodoxy of thought self-propagates itself despite not reflecting the current reality. Sachs’ model of economic development especially in regards to post-Soviet economies has largely been proven to be a failure. Mearsheimer after years of pushback to his realist thinking in particular has taken a curiously Kremlin apologist stance that is conciliatory towards Russia and China, allying himself with what some have called the “PayPal Mafia,” consisting of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks et. al.
This “PayPal Mafia” has consistently pushed a borderline anti-West, anti-American narrative based on Kremlin propaganda including not not excluding advocating for cryptocurrency, the ending of the global system of state engagement (the UN model), the pushing of bilateral agreements between nations (that often favor the stronger party) rather than multilateral agreements that adhere to agreed upon understandings that hold all countries accountable. Interestingly, these “realists” have made unlikely allies in the likes of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange, Matt Taibbi among others. At first glance, these alliances may seem nonsensical in the eclectic nature, but many have pointed out that there is a throughline of “all roads go back to (Putin) Russia.”
While the American “deep state,” beyond its usage by the far right to demonize and trivialize the dedicated work of government employees whose efforts underpins American government, has its inconsistencies and inefficiencies, the “deep state” was a result of the realization by the US Congress that as the US became bigger both in size and population that it would be impossible for Congress to address every issue in its minutia. In the early days of the American Republic, Congress through its Power of the Purse signed off on every dollar of spending by passing relevant laws. This Congressional model that was based off of the English tradition of local councils worked well for a somewhat decentralized, young nation of frontiersmen but would not be workable for an advanced nation. Thus Congress started passing “Big Laws” that were sweeping in nature, and left the implementation up to the experts and experience bureaucrats in each departmental agency. After all, one would not consult a dentist for a heart problem. Solving problems should be left up to experts in their respective fields, rather than being micromanaged. While this arrangement worked well for decades following WWII, corporate interests started fighting back against regulation that benefits the citizens since by nature, making business changes due to new regulation would cost money and at least in the short term, decrease profits.
The seminal SCOTUS 1984 case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (“Chevron”) had SCOTUS agreeing that decisions on how to implement laws are best left to departmental agencies within the Executive Branch, which derive their regulatory power from the Executive’s Constitutional mandate to faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress. The earlier 2024 overruling of the Chevron precedent in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is the culmination of 4 decades of corporate interests successfully chipping away at state regulatory power in the pursuit of profits. Overruling Chevron does address the alleged inefficiencies of any human bureaucracy, but it introduces an even bigger problem: now unless Congress passes specific laws (in effect Congress becoming the regulator), which Congress is not equipped at an expert level to opine on, the regulatory regime has been disrupted. A case in throwing the baby out with the bathwater as some had observed. With the US Congress being divided along partisan lines, in which one side wants to actually do the work while the other side opposes all change, legal experts have predicted that taking out Chevron actually will ultimately increase Executive control due to Congressional deadlock, while diminishing the Legislative branch even more — not the solution in a tripartite governing system of Separation of Power.
Now in regard to the Philippine “deep state,” I will share a perhaps unpopular, but I think fair opinion. I have heard from the elder, educated diaspora who had fled Martial Law remark in as many words that “Filipinos love Americanism so much that Filipinos copied many American habits, while making it more complicated,” hence the other observation among the older diaspora that the Philippines is like a “cargo cult” when it comes to adopting ideas abroad. By this, they meant that for example, Americans are famous for bureaucracy and paperwork, so Filipinos instituted paperwork requirements at every level to the point no one really understands what the requirements are for anymore. If there is an ongoing government effort in the US to simplify and make more plain to understand government processes, the Philippines often does the opposite — more complication “feels more important.” Thus we have situations where to do something simple as getting married requires: birth certificate, baptism certificate, NBI clearance, barangay clearance, mayoral clearance, proof of residency, and so on until Filipinos conclude that due to not being able understand, afford, or just plain “deal with” the requirements, they will just become live in partners. The same extraneous processes are also replicated in the private sector, with banks requiring what seems to be half a ream’s worth of bond paper of requirements in order to open a bank account.
The American so-called “deep state” exists to serve the interests of the American people in most cases, even under Republican leadership prior to Trump. Does the American “deep state” get it right all the time? Of course not, since they are guided by the Executive’s influence and may develop institutional rigidity over time. But in the case of the Philippine “deep state,” I feel that it exists to lord over people rather than to serve. As to why this is in the Philippines, the answer is complicated yet can be simplified roughly to titles and authority granted by titles to be much more important in the Philippines than it is in the US. In the Philippines, anyone with even a minor title often seeks to lord their title over those that are supposed to be served. I don’t think that in all my travels and globe trotting, I’ve ever encountered a country where such importance was placed in titles, where it is considered a faux pas to not address a lawyer by “Attorney” or an engineer by “Engineer.” I consider this to be a natural extension of pre-colonial importance of titles that separate upper classes from the rabble below.
I would actually argue for the need for the Philippines to adopt an American style “deep state,” but let’s stop using this right wing term which has derogatory and conspiratorial undertones. The Philippines needs legions of competent bureaucrats in every executive agency, competent and impartial judges in the Judiciary, and last but most importantly a Congress that has the courage to pass sweeping “Big Laws” that would lay down a vision of a better Philippines, just like the US did for the better part of a century. Then after the “Big Laws” are passed, let the bureaucrats start work on implementing the vision across the nation.
What the American far right and corporate alliance had done in “killing” Chevron deference was that they thought it would usher in another period of Laissez-faire corporatism similar to the Gilded Age of robber barons, under the guise of “freedom from the bureaucrats.” What actually happened is now the regulations, which still need to exist, are the responsibility of a Congress that is prone to inaction. In the Philippines, it’s quite different, with the Philippine Congress teetering from periods of laziness/inaction to furious micromanagement. Often laws are passed in the Philippines with no Congressional hearings of experts so that congressmen and senators may have an informed basis for their legal deliberations. This is why, I think, Philippines law often has the feeling of being “magic bullet” legislation, then the growing paperwork requirements is just a sign of everyone “covering their behinds” so they can at least say they are “complying.” Not a good way to do things.
A lot there to parse. Let me short-form some reactions.
1. Yes, there is a legitimate deep state that is the equity of all that has gone before facing today’s issues, generally with no ill will, but with ill the outcome of some actions within it. The MAGA deep state is a nefarious fiction consistent with their destructive methods. I am referring to the former, and also think the Philippine deep state generally has no ill will. It is also unseen. Unknown.
2. The penchant for titles is an excellent visible face of the suppression of equality, and the suppression of opportunity, favoring the entitled. Thank you for giving us that visible reference.
3. We need a replacement term for deep state that is not taken as pejorative. I’ll go for “sovereign equity” to reflect both its goodness and its durable persistence through all kinds of abuse.
4. Yes for big laws that would tear down all the rats nests of counterproductive nit picking, oppressive laws. One such law should yank the courts’ collective head out of their ass to assure quick, fair, meaningful justice. Not penny ante trivial oppressive justice.
5. Filipinos have been in charge of themselves for 75 years and any lingering Americanism in the system has nothing to do with America. Filipinos should own who they are.
I think the reason why JP and I are allergic to the terminology of “deep state,” is that the term developed quite negative connotations starting with right wing think tanks before being mainstreamed by MAGA, where previously “deep state” was mostly a Beltway inside joke per my understanding. I have my own views on the Philippine bureaucracy, which I consider largely ineffective and incompetent in carrying out the laws under the Executive. Perhaps my view is a bit uncharitable, and I do not like the imperiousness that often surfaces, you’re right that the Philippine bureaucracy generally has no ill will, similar to how the American bureaucracy has no ill will. The bureaucracy could serve the people better though, under better leadership which is the responsibility of each departmental head and ultimately rests in the lap of the President. Now how to attract better serving bureaucrats? That’s another question, but I’d like to imagine better pay and working conditions would help. Aquino started doing this but his progress was largely rolled back.
I think “sovereign equity” might be a good term to use. It would also help that government employees are reminded constantly that they are there to serve the citizens, not to lord over them. If you recall, DMVs here in the US used to be terrible offices filled with petty tyrants, but in the last decade many governors put in place political picks that reformed DMVs across many states. I was actually a bit shocked that it was actually enjoyable to be helped at the DMV a few years ago.
One point of caution for “Big Laws” in the Philippines is that it also creates opportunities for pork barrel. To counter this, Congress should hold frequent and effective hearings to hold agency heads to account on the budget. The current crop of opposition leaders is quite good at this and brings me some hope. Some examples of “Big Laws” to tackle are: industrial policy that attracts FDI building factories all over the Philippines, infrastructure investments to link the industrial zones together with export zones, pursuing energy independence so that the Philippines isn’t held hostage to fluctuating global commodity prices, finally completing agriculture reform.
Terrific set of big laws that would power the nation. I understand the “bad” definition of deep state, but that isn’t the one the two professors used, so I leaped off the diving board they erected. The problem with ‘sovereign equity’ is that about 0.0001% of the population would grasp the concept. BTW, I am also proud to be woke and I think the antis can’t even define what they mean. I’m certainly not going to go by their definitions, being almost religious in my admiration for Humpty Dumpty who insists that a word means whatever the speaker intends for it to mean. 🙂
I’m sure someone will come up with a simple term for an honest and effective bureaucracy. I tend to try to emphasize “civil servant,” because that’s what all levels of government should be doing — serving the people. After all, Enlightenment ideas which the Filipino founders were inspired by made it clear that the people are the sovereign, rather than government. Along the way, something went wrong in that Marcos Sr. was enabled to seize power. It’s been many decades of setbacks, but the Philippines can go back to being inspired by the likes of Rizal and Quezon (who I consider to be the founder of the modern Philippines).
Filipinos don’t want to be servants.
We need a euphemism similar to kasambahay replacing katulong.
There are already too many euphemisms in Filipino society 😅
But the sad fact that Filipinos don’t want to be servants to the idea, also means there probably won’t be a servant leader or servant bureaucrats. Everyone seems to want to become a hari eventually, even within their own household in the slums. In a nation where most everyone aspires to become a petty king, I then wonder how “the people” as a whole or “the law” can become the sovereign?
..more complication feels more important.. the AD 900 Laguna copperplate not only certifies (and repeats) that the Honorable Namwaran and his descendants are hereby free of “hutang” (debt) – it mentions an entire legion of higher datus around his previous overlord.. if one reads it, it is remiscent of a modern Philippine affidavit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laguna_Copperplate_Inscription
“A country where such importance was placed on titles” – Austria comes to mind, a country ruled by the same political family that conquered the Philippines, the Habsburgs. Even as modern Austrians mock that at times as a holdover from “KUK” (Kaiser und König, meaning Imperial Austro-Hungarian] times it might still be very important in formal settings. Don’t know what your experience was there, I find especially Vienna interesting.
“Legions of competent bureaucrats” at least at a propaganda level, that was what Marcos Sr. claimed to be building with his “New Society technocrats,” but that was probably window-dressing like a lot of things back then.
I once read an article in a book about Southeast Asian “men of prowess” with a chapter showing an Indonesian government official as an example of a “man of prowess.” That struck me, as in its older sense, datus, rajas and sultans were seen as men of prowess in insular SEA.
In the Philippines, a technocrat like Mar Roxas is more likely to be seen as “bayot” while the likes of Duterte are seen as men of prowess. Chel Diokno is ridiculed while Tulfo is cheered. Somehow, the Filipino mindset has retrograded. As MLQ3 wrote: “The Commonwealth was modern, with a nod to tradition. The New Society was traditional, with a nod to modernity. In 2016, the periphery took over.” I once commented to Edgar Lores in a thread that the modern stuff learned in half a millenium there seemed to have washed away like thin topsoil.
There are some diaspora Vietnamese who still refer to my father by our (defunct) noble title, just as some referred to my grandfather on my mother’s side by a similar title. I find it similar to how some habitually refer to my father by his military rank though he’s been retired from the military since 1975. Once I dated a woman whose surname included “Ton Nu,” which designates her as a direct female descendant of the Nguyen dynasty, where her family opposed with our pairing since I’m but a distant “branch” member equivalent to a country hillbilly apparently.
I’m not that familiar with modern Austria besides them being “funny Germans,” which really pisses them off. I’m just an ignorant American here, hehe. Historical Austria, I’m more familiar with due to my appetite for history. I have heard of the “Kaiser und König” though, which reminds me of other royal families that still carry on hope for regaining power through whoever is the current pretender to the throne. I tend to think all the pomp and circumstance is more of a ritual they themselves think is important while everyone else is indifferent. A sign of detachment from reality. By the way, I also have observed a lot of ritualization in the Philippines among all areas of society, but especially in the areas of religion and government. Government officials cling to their rituals once they taste a bit of power; normal people just want to get the process over with.
I wasn’t around at the time, but my understanding is that the New Society was an attempt to put a band-aid over nearly a decade of Martial Law and the raiding of the Philippines inherited wealth during the Third Republic. Of course the damage had already been done, and I don’t think New Society made any real attempts to reform. To my reading it seemed that New Society was an acceleration of the Martial Law regime.
It’s interesting how the ancient systems of power were translated into modern times differently by societies that descended from the same proto-ethnic stock. The path that Indonesia and Malaysia took was definitely different from the Philippines.
On continental Southeast Asia with Vietnam and in the Korean Peninsula with South Korea, they took a different path, Vietnam after “Đổi Mới” provided an alternative economic roadmap for the communist government’s previous mistakes, and in South Korea with fledgling democracy pushing for economic reforms. As I mentioned previously both the Vietnamese and Koreans have a long, two thousand plus years tradition of respect and deference towards government bureaucrats as the pinnacle of meritocracy in a Confucian system. Of course, this also caused deference to bad leaders during the Korean War and Vietnam War (with South Korea surviving due to continued American intervention and having time to reform, South Vietnam failing and taking longer to reform due to the opposite). In the modern age, Korean and Vietnamese business leaders are seen as the “new” Confucian meritocrats. Of course in a Confucian meritocracy, even a commoner could become a top level official through his meritorious service, which is quite different from the tribal warlord system of datus. Not many Westerners or non-Chinese would understand, but Singapore’s success is in large part to LKK’s application of Confucian meritocracy modified for a modern state, not through his authoritarian-enabled reforms.
I don’t think the Filipino mindset is degraded. I think the Filipino mindset among the lower classes that have not yet been touched by modernization have had the “light bulb” moment to apply cultural inheritance in a modern way like Indonesia and Malaysia have. My feel is that the modern stuff has always been the realm of Philippine elite society and those adjacent to elites. For the vast DE classes, while they may have TVs, mobile phones, a motorcycle, their mindset is still very much stuck in the maginoo-maharlika-alipin mental complex.
we poor people treat the rich like royalties, that’s how we virtually kiss ass, haha, and that’s how we get them to do things for us. we are good at cajoling and boosting their egos, games we have played and play well. where would the rich be without us, applauding wholeheartedly their quasi achievements, spreading news of their supposedly massive good will and defenders of their utter good names! we are fan base and we got our clubhouse gratis.
we show respect as befitting them, and get something from them in return, like maybe employ us, feed us and remember us in times of greatest need. if we make fun of them behind their backs, that is only coz we’re human, but that is not for everybody to see coz making fun of benefactors openly is not just crude, rude but deadly as well.
though a number of rich bosses have been reportedly at receiving end and meet their demise at the hands of the poor they despised.
that’s actually a very good point vis a vis deep state, kb. that CDE folks do have a say. whether thru election or armed rebellion. said consent can totally be revoked one way or another. at the time of their choosing of course, like slavery in American sometimes it takes a while. or sometimes it happens quick.
but usually it unfolds like this, I guess why a deep state is necessary.
deep state! we poor people are totally innocents. it’s not our fault the rich retreated to the safety of their own enclave and lived in gated communities complete with security personnel, security alarms and guard dogs. not our fault our being poor, smelly, grotty and maybe lack of hygiene coz our clothes are stained and looked as though they have seen better days, our look cutthroats and not mestisos and mestisas, cause richer people offense.
not our faults the rich sees us thru binoculars and keep us at arms length. though we look at them mostly sideways coz looking straight at them may cause them to faint and drop dead! and we could well be blamed of casting spells and witchcraft, and be sent to jail.
honestly though, if we poor caused the rich discomfort and whatnots, that they have to throw money to keep us out of their way, out of sight but never out of mind, apology is in the offing.
Oh my… real observations again from KB. I have personally seen rich Filipinos literally throw money at a poor person to make them go away (and this is before the poor person even asked for food/money). Sometimes the money thrown is in peso bills (preferred). Sometimes it was semi-maliciously in centavo/peso coins (painful).
Hmm, how can the cycle of power and subservience be broken? Even when the rich and powerful were on the receiving end of the masses’ anger and met their demise, the masses only found a new rich or powerful person to follow…
pope francis once said, there are questions that cannot be answered. and may I add that life is to be lived, not a problem to be solved. too much thinking will only cause proliferation of gray hair and damn facial wrinkles to flourish!
nutty, hah! we do what we can. and those that we cannot do, are left for better others to do.
Pope Francis’ words are very true here. I think it would be a mistake to expect everyone to do everything. But each of us can try to do the best we can do with what we understand and are capable of doing.
True. We are kept little and low status in the society as much as possible so those in power will be perceived as gods.
a simple process is made difficult via requirements to achieve a task. Red tapes.
an example is exiting a Philippines airport. An immigration officer grills a fellow Filipino with a lot of questions before stamping your passport exit date. Sometimes immigration officers do this just to show their power over a lowly, innocent OFW or Filipino expat.
They freely don’t ask questions to high nosed Foreigners and just bow to them . Colonial mentality.
immig officers do ask lots of questions specially from 1st time travelers, that’s how they find out who is trafficked, who are drug mules, money launderers, etc. and that’s how they got tony yang too, the elder brother of michael yang, duterte’s chinese finance minister. also netted are foreigners who dont have legal passports.
if asked questions at airports, pls answer truthfully, precisely and calmly. dont panic and dont lose your cool.
there are foreigners who got through airport checks with no hassles, most are diplomatic staff and are not subject to customs scrutiny.
“Sometimes immigration officers do this just to show their power over a lowly, innocent OFW or Filipino expat.” and sometimes to make some extra income, Art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninoy_Aquino_International_Airport_bullet_planting_scandal
” “If this is just a few random bandits running around and extorting people, this would have been squashed long ago. But the fact that it is still going on means that the entire airport is corrupt,“ he said. Ryan White was alleged to have had a bullet in his luggage when he checked through NAIA last September, possession of which is a crime in Philippine law.”
Hi Art, yes, good example. I can attest, though, that in their offices, Immigration Officers also snarl at we foreigners, too. But your point is good. The vertical hierarchy of power is so prominent that a lot of Filipinos seem to run around all day discriminating against other Filipinos. Probably because other filipinos, especially government officials, do that to them. It’s so strange as I think about it. Such warm, friendly people, in the main, caught in the trap of each being authoritarian in many circumstances.
it cannot be an easy job, being border security and screening travelers at airports seems discriminatory and authoritarian. those that dont passed muster are sent back and their visa cancelled! though travelers have right to appeal and must be fast on their feet for they may only be given an hour or so to appeal. if their papers are not in order and they cannot make the necessary phone call to the person/s most likely to help them like their lawyer, they may well be in trouble. crying does not help, nor throwing tantrum. and if they pretend to be sick, medical expenses can be hefty.
though there are border security that act weirdly like the one that got caught on cctv eating 300 dollars bills! and was let go, lost her job she did.
today, there are cctvs at airports, those with legitimate complaints backed up by cctv footage of the incident, can air their grievances and get a fair hearing, be likely compensated.
Being an Immigration Officer is a tough job and hard to hold. You grill the wrong person, you lose your job. You let Alice Guo slip through, you lose your job. I don’t travel much anymore. What used to be an adventure is now a series of tests and stresses I can do without. The US agents are tough friendly, the Hong Kong agents can’t smile. Nor Filipino now that I think about it. Although I was so cheerful to one lady, she did actually smile. I hope she didn’t lose her job.
haha, I actually send flowers and chocolates to frontline officers who are more humans than robots. show my appreciation and to encourage them to keep doing their best even in high pressure job. not often you find a helpful officer as most are stressed with flights being cancelled, weather often stormy, passengers getting antsy, emergencies here and there, bedbugs and cockroaches infestations that rendered airport seats at naia hazardous to health. a smile and a kind word cost nothing. in our fast paced society, those are rarely expressed anymore and people who are efficient are often seen as cold.
That’s unusual, that kind of understanding. Most of the time everything seems like a battle. I’ll have to practice what you preach.
In addition to the three you listed, there should be the fourth and even a fifth, in that
For years, politicians at the local level are really much operating like their towns, cities, or provinces as medieval fiefdoms, with themselves imagining as nobility lording over peasants and the merchant class whom the latter they better interact with in profit-making, overt and covert.
That they will write and enact laws and ordinances that have the appearance of doing good things (Bataan governor’s draconian war against tobacco, believing himself a paragon of virtue but really running a mini-dictatorship) but for their own benefit and image-making.
That, yes, they will vigorously shoot down any legislation or bureaucratic order limiting their powers, to ensure their status quo is kept running despite disruption from civil society and progressive groups.
That without doubt the political elite will arrange for their children relationships, grooming them for succession by both engaging them in the family business and gifting them Sangguniang Kabataan (repackaged Kabataang Barangay of the old Marcos Sr. rule) positions.
If there is a “deep state” in the public halls of the cities and towns and provinces, and their corresponding bureaucratic equivalents, like the Italian princes in the world of Machiavelli these politicians and bureaucrats simultaneously compete against and/or cooperate each other for personal profit, often at the cost of the marginalized people they are supposed to serve.
Yes, mad, those are persistent themes within the Philippine deep state, the government almost “owned” by the family in charge. I’m sure Imelda thinks she is a power today, again. And the criminal syndicate that is allowed to persist. One could argue that Aquino was different, but Customs was never reigned in, and other corruption persisted locally. It is, after all, the nature of the beast.
1986 could have been a good time to start from scratch, getting rid of the old bureaucracy completely and instead rebuilding with new faces and with technical foreign assistance. But the post-revolution chaos forced Aquino to compromise by keeping the old Marcos bureaucrats if only to retain a semblance of a functioning government, and thus allowing the rackets to continue untouched.
Speaking of the Imeldific… Recently I took time off on the weekend visiting Mall of Asia, and with disgust looked at the annexation of the once-breathtaking Manila Bay through reclamation.
Which led to me thinking who is to ultimately profit from that reclamation, and with the Dutertes and their cronies — whom they originally approved the wholesale reclamation — being displaced piecemeal their grip on their “offshore investment” is fleeting, and instead the Marcoses appeared to be standing to gain (again) so much from it, not merely Rocket Bong and his Araneta frog princess, but also the rest of the family including the Imeldific who must surely be running the country by committee, like so much the American Mafia “Commission”.
Lovely characterization of things. I’d love to have the power to track the money behind those reclamation projects to see how much went to the Reclamation commissioners. What a tragedy. The proponents just went to local governments and the sum of the projects is a grand filling in of a once magnificent bay. The locals most assuredly took their cut of the moneystream. Then, in typical fashion, Marcos stopped the projects but didn’t stop the projects? Followup, transparency, and precision are not traits of the deep state. Indeed, they are the enemies.
rapid urbanisation and massive extraction of ground water have made manila a sinking city second only to jakarta, the once indonesian capital now abandoned. who knows! maybe manilenyos will learn to breathe and thrive under water in flood prune manila, be resistant to leptospirosis, dengue and alipunga. and instead of cars, manilenyos will have speedboats, skyways instead of walkways and highways, helipads instead of airports.
at the moment, mayor honey lacunya of manila is feeling betrayed, her one time friend and ally, isko moreno wants her job. flooding is probly the last thing in her mind, but it has to be asked now that election is coming at full swing, and manila may flood yet again.
Welcome back ML!
The Manila Bay reclamation project reminds me of the old South Reclamation Project in Cebu (now known as South Road Properties). Former Mayor Tomas Osmeña had envisioned SRP to house light factories to jump start Cebu’s industrialization to provide jobs for Cebuanos. Somewhere along the way, SRP was used instead for luxury apartments and condos, a new megamall, casinos, luxury hotels. SRP has been extolled as a “progressive paradise,” but for whom? Certainly not the informal settlers who were pushed out of the area. Perhaps only for those who can afford to live and play in the luxury master-planned community. Now with the completion of the CCLEX bridge, the LGU is doing the same to my beloved quiet Cordova on Mactan where I spent many mornings and evenings watching the sunrise over the Cebu mountains and the sunset over the Bohol Sea.