WE’RE at Week 4 of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (“ECQ”) over Luzon, and the situation has improved in some respects but gotten worse in others. On the one hand, we have ramped up our testing capability, and now aim to begin mass testing of patients under investigation (PUIs) and patients under monitoring (PUMs) by April 14, 2020. The ECQ itself has been extended to April 30. While there seems to be no discernible plan to justify the extension, it at least gives us the opportunity to do the mass testing while still limiting overall mobility, helping identify infection “hotspots” and form additional guidelines perhaps on a per-barangay level.

On the other hand, the so-called Social Amelioration Program has acted like its acronym suggests: slow to drip down, and when handled got quite messy as the recent impromptu gatherings in Quezon City and Rizal province have suggested. Police-controlled checkpoints are still a “mileage may vary” matter, with anecdotal cases of sexual harassment and general incompetence staining what are otherwise sincere efforts in enforcing the ECQ. President “Kawawa Naman At Mukhang Pagod Na Yung Matanda” Duterte still has his pre-taped late-night brain farts, the bulk of which will be downplayed/explained/excused to death by his spokespersons, official or otherwise, or will be overruled by the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) or by the National Task Force Against COVID-19 (NTF).

And people wonder why critics of the Duterte regime, well, criticize it so much.

In response to the criticism, a common refrain of the recently rejuvenated/created Duterte Death Squad (“DDS”) internet trolls is “Huwag kang reklamador, tumulong ka na lang!” Devoid of context, it seems like a reasonable enough counterargument. After all, what does the act of complaining do, especially in the vast void of the Internet? That energy could be put to more productive use.

But, this is Joke and Dagger, and if you’re been reading this column long enough then you know what’s coming next.

Let’s be clear. Being a critic is not being a “reklamador.”  Criticism is not a complaint. Nor does it automatically mean that critics want to replace Duterte (though that isn’t an altogether bad idea, but I’ll get back to that later).

To illustrate, let’s use an analogy (a DDS favorite!):  Let’s say you’re at home on a hot day and the electric fan you received as a gift is malfunctioning. The blades are moving slowly, to the point that it produces no air current. Long story short, the fan “works,” but it does not do what it is supposed to do: produce an air current that will relieve you on a hot day.

Saying, “OMG ang init di ko na kaya” is a complaint, and yes that does nothing to resolve the fact that the fan isn’t working right. On the other hand, asking the people who built the fan, “Why isn’t the electric fan working properly?” isn’t a complaint. It’s a legitimate question that deserves a legitimate answer.

Legitimate answers include, “Sorry, there’s a screw loose in the motor, let us tighten that,” and “Oh it seems the power output of your socket is too low, please have an electrician take a look at it.” Equally legitimate would be, “There is a foreign object that prevents the fan from moving optimally, we can safely remove it and get the fan working again.” And in all honesty, even “Apologies, the fan was completely defective, we’ll replace it with a fan that works” is absolutely a legitimate, if not excessive, response.

“Edi wow ikaw na ang magaling, ikaw na lang kaya maging electric fan manufacturer?” is not a legitimate response. Neither is “Eh kung iba yung manufacturer malamang mas malala pa yung sira!” “Eh mas malaki pa yung sira ng mga dating electric fan na meron kayo, nagreklamo ba kayo dati?” doesn’t quite make it as a proper response either. But perhaps the most inappropriate response is, “Kawawa naman yung fan, matanda na at mukhang nahihirapan na, intindihin mo na lang yung fan.”

An electric fan is only as good as it is able to achieve what it is built for. In the same manner, a President and their administration are only as good as they are able to achieve what they are voted into office for.

I don’t recall Duterte being voted into office because he’s old, stressed, and tired, and deserves our pity. Do you?

LAST Monday, I stayed up all night, eagerly anticipating Tatay Digong’s speech. It had been a week since I last heard his inspiring words, and I wanted to hear it some more. In this time of great need, Tatay Digong is my one and only source of strength and comfort.

They announced the start of his speech at 4 p.m., so starting that time I checked and rechecked the live feed. At 4:01 p.m., I started to worry for Tatay Digong, but thankfully Malacañang issued a statement saying that Tatay was still busy talking to his Cabinet members. I’m sure they were just quadruple-checking all of the finer details of their fantastic, marvelous action plan.

All throughout dinner, even while taking a bath, I kept the feed link on, as Tatay Digong could go live at any time. I even dozed off a few times, and each time I woke up I made myself a cup of coffee and drank it all in one gulp just to hear Tatay Digong’s angelic voice.

Finally, at 11:35 p.m., the feed went alive. And so did my now-palpitating caffeine-fueled heart. Tatay Digong was talking! Hallelujah!

I was a bit saddened that it turned out to be taped, but oh! His words, his prose! Tatay Digong always has a lot of words, the best words. And what words they were, calling frontliners lucky for dying while serving the country.

But I digress.

It was just awe-inspiring to listen to Tatay Digong lay out his National Action Plan — or NAP for short. Maybe it should be called Power NAP, because it feels like it has so much power? Or maybe a Cat NAP, because it’s so nimble and agile? Either way, the NAP was just so beautifully detailed, right down to the last centavo. I cried tears of joy. Amazing!

When Tatay Digong started reading the list of all these great governments of the world and these corporations and individuals who pitched in their help, I couldn’t help but marvel at how much all of these other governments, corporations, and individuals must love and adore Tatay Digong, to go out of their way to help him help us.

So after those fifteen glorious minutes, I went to sleep, dreams full of Tatay Digong’s breathtaking speech. I woke up with such a fresh feeling, knowing that I’d get to read Tatay Digong’s full report.

And what a report it was! Such action! Much wow! It was so comforting to know that many of the actions Duterte reported have been in place since even before the grant of emergency powers, because consistency is key! No flip-flops here, no paralysis or indications of agencies forming plans just now as they go along, it’s all action all the time! It’s the best!

And now as I write this, I cannot help but be giddy with joy as I recall Tatay Digong’s voice, his poetry, his art. I cannot help but write this piece, full of inspiration and awe, knowing that when you read this, dear reader, you will know just how outstanding Tatay Digong made me feel with his speech and his report.

After all, today, the First of April, is the same day it is, every year, year after year

 LAST Monday, I was watching the livestream of the House of Representatives deliberations on the proposed bill granting Duterte “emergency powers” to supposedly handle the COVID-19 pandemic. I tuned in, fully expecting that it would be hours upon hours of non-stop non-deliberations, full of meandering speeches, pompous statements, and gratuitous glad-handing towards Natutulog-in-Chief/President Duterte.

Not to mention suspensions of the deliberations. So, so many suspensions.

But during one of the suspensions, something odd happened. The Speaker of the House and modern floor lamp Alan Peter Cayetano started gathering other legislators in attendance. They formed what can only be described as a grid of House representatives along with Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea, and then held up what looked like a sign made of Manila paper. As the livestream camera could not zoom in, the actual content of the sign wasn’t visible in the feed. After this, the House continued its session.

I would find out later on that Cayetano and Medialdea held up a grade-school quality sign (with sincere apologies to actual grade school students who do much, much better work), containing the following text:

“Together with doctors and frontliners, we went to work for you, so please stay home for us!”

I would be face-palming excessively had we not been advised by doctors to avoid touching our faces.

Now under normal circumstances, there would have been perhaps only a smattering of offense expressed, with the usual Duterte Death Squad trolls spinning the sign as some sort of message of hope and inspiration or other such nonsense.

But Luzon is under quarantine, and most people are at home, on their Internet connections, watching. And so the indignation was loud, the backlash was swift, and the memes were merciless.

Here’s the thing about the Internet: Once you release something into the wild, it gains a life of its own. And so the photo of Cayetano and Medialdea holding up the message on Manila paper quickly became the same image but with a blank sheet. A blank canvass, if you will, for the kind of savagery that only the Internet can deliver. A few choice ones were collected by Scout Magazine on their Twitter timeline, which you can find at https://twitter.com/scoutmagph.

In fact, the backlash was so bad that Cayetano addressed it the very next day, claiming he would “do it again” if it got people to read it and stay home. I’m fairly certain many people felt like doing the opposite of staying at home and maintaining social distancing with Cayetano after that.

It is precisely that level of clownery that gives people reason to doubt the sincerity of this administration and its enablers. When legislators are too busy either patting their own backs or scratching Duterte’s, it inspires contempt rather than confidence that the jobs they’re doing aren’t just for Duterte’s benefit.

As luck would have it, the Senate, despite its own roster of sycophants and clowns, let restraint prevail, and modified the proposed bill to limit Duterte’s power to realign funding and removed the proposed power to take over businesses, except for refusal or inability to comply with directives. A deserved, if not rare, hat-tip to the Senate.

All that is left is for Duterte to sign the bill once it reaches his office, and get to work. Given Duterte’s recent, if not frequent, absences from the public eye since the quarantine was put into effect, perhaps we should manage our expectations and prepare for the “urgent” bill to lapse into law instead?

HELLO dear reader, and welcome back.

Today I will set aside my usual rants about this hopelessly and breathtakingly incompetent Duterte regime, and focus instead on the present efforts to minimize the spread of COVID-19, including some talking points on the enhanced community quarantine currently in effect on the entire Luzon island.

COVID-19 (the name of the disease caused by the virus, which is, by the way, pronounced “vÄ«rÉ™s” and not “veerus”) is here, and it is here to stay. With the enhanced community quarantine, it is our hope that it doesn’t stay for long.

What is this “enhanced community quarantine?” In a nutshell, government has prohibited mass gatherings and will try to keep everyone home. The majority of businesses have been forced to close up temporarily. Government offices have reduced its own workforce to only the bare minimum needed for frontline services. Local governments have imposed curfews as well.

The objective of all this, in theory, is to minimize the movement of people and to avoid people being in close proximity with others. The logic is that if people don’t move around too much or come into contact with many people, the virus cannot spread as quickly as it ordinarily would. This will keep our health system from collapsing from the sheer influx of potentially infected patients, and give medical science more time to develop a vaccine.

So to help this come to fruition, here’s what we can do: First, stay home. If you are work in one of the exempted businesses and cannot work from home, then please take the necessary precautions. Have a mask on you, use it when appropriate. Practice social distancing which, let’s face it, is nothing more than observing personal space plus maybe half a meter more. Maybe we can call it “enhanced personal space.”

An aside. If you need to commute to work, please be aware that national government has banned all public transportation, including taxis and TNVS. Local governments, on the other hand, appear to have some discretion on allowing tricycles to remain in operation, with restrictions. Contact your local government and your place of work and see what arrangements can be made for your safe transport. I’ve read that the Office of the Vice President is making arrangements for transport for health workers, so if you’re in the medical field you may want to keep an eye out for that.

Another aside. I know that many of us do not have the resources to survive an entire month without income. There are government efforts to mitigate this. It may not be enough. Contact your barangay officials and see what else may be needed that you can contribute directly if they are amenable to that sort of arrangement.

Second, if you’re leaving home, make sure it’s for medical purposes, or to buy food and other essentials. Yes, it’s okay to buy tingi if that is what your budget allows. No, do not hoard food. Or hand sanitizer. Or toilet paper. Or *anything.* Just, don’t.

Yes, some restaurants can still deliver food, if that’s how you roll. Be kind and please tip the delivery people generously.

Speaking of which. If you live or work where there are security guards or maintenance staff still reporting for work, please give them something extra like food and water. They are among the most economically vulnerable for the next few weeks.

Third, regularly wash your hands with soap and water. For at least twenty seconds. There are many ways to count up to twenty in your head. Popular ones include singing “Happy Birthday” twice, or reciting the Team Rocket introduction verbatim. My personal favorite is a stanza from “Killing In The Name Of” by Rage Against The Machine. Take a guess which one.

Fourth: Coordinate with your barangays. They are government’s first responders and fastest link to your city or municipal government should the need arise.

Fifth: Pressure your House representatives to pass the supplemental budget bill for DOH. While you’re at it, pressure them into pressuring the DOH to procure more testing kits. The more LGUs with testing capabilities, the better. The more we can test persons under investigation for possible COVID-19 infections, the more we can determine the extent and location of these infections, and adjust our actions and policies accordingly.

But hey, if all else fails, we can, as one doctor suggested, count the dead. Not that we’ve stopped counting the dead since 2016, this will just fall into another category of people dying under Duterte’s watch.

WHILE Tagaytay and Batangas are busy dealing with the eruption of Taal Volcano, our fearless leader is busy trying to ensure local government disaster response preparedness and national government agency preparedne…

Sorry, sorry, I really tried but I couldn’t keep typing that sentence with a straight face.

In reality, King of the Hunt replacement candidate Rodrigo Duterte went around handing cash “gifts” to soldiers and did the rounds with Taal eruption victims for photo ops. In between, he was pictured as riding pricey motorcycles around the Malacanang compound with his manservant and occasional Sen. Bong Go. Because of course he would.

“Let him have his break! He’s old!” defended the DDS. That defense, by the way, is brought to us by the same bunch of yahoos who invented the term “noynoying.”

Beyond that, if he’s so old and needs his breaks so much, then why doesn’t he just resign? After all, by all accounts Duterte’s regime has been a runaway success. Don’t believe what

I just wrote? Neither do I, but the folks over at the Presidential Communications Operations Office sure want you to believe it, with a full-on all-expenses-paid-by-taxpayer money propaganda bonanza called “The Duterte Legacy.”

Openly wondering, don’t normal people usually talk about someone’s legacy only when the person is either finished with the work or dead?

The Duterte Legacy supposedly features all of Duterte’s accomplishments over the past 3-ish years. But as journalists like Prinze Magtulis (whose Twitter profile you can check out at https://twitter.com/prinzmagtulis) pointed out, many of the figures used in this campaign were either outdated, inaccurate, or completely baseless.

Which I suppose makes the campaign completely appropriate for the Duterte regime.

Oddly, while the PNP routinely and prominently features the “official” number of people killed in their “war on drugs” campaign, that number was nowhere to be found in the PCOO campaign.

The deeper issue here is that the act of presenting false information as truth, previously relegated to the DDS troll networks and pro-Duterte bloggers and individuals, now seems to have been officially adopted by the PCOO as a communication policy and strategy. I mean it’s bad enough that Duterte does it 9/10 of the time, with the rest of his spokespersons officially and unofficially scrambling to correct/reframe/rephrase/interpret what Duterte says.

Now, we have an entire office doing it. What joy!

The best part is, the recent Duterte Legacy exhibit was just the start. They want to go around the world promoting it. More free junkets for choice Duterte supporters, at taxpayer’s expense!

What this tells us is that something is up. Surveys suggest that Duterte continues to have widespread support, if not passive approval from the greater majority of Filipinos here and abroad. There really should be no need for this kind of gross disinformation campaign.

In the end, a disinformation campaign officially sanctioned by the Duterte regime sends two signals. First, it doesn’t trust its DDS base enough to discern facts the way the Duterte regime wants them to discern facts. Not entirely sure if that is implied praise for the DDS or blatant insult. And second, it no longer trusts its informal networks — namely, the DDS bloggers and troll centers — to get the job done.

One thing’s for sure: “Legacy” is not the proper word for all this.

More like, “Liegacy.”

Edi wow, ikaw na ang magaling, ikaw na lang kaya maging Presidente?”

You’d think that this kind of reasoning would be limited to Facebook comments or Twitter barbs.

You’d be thinking wrong.

No less than the Philippine president and perennial social outcast everywhere outside of the country, Rodrigo Duterte, said as much a few days ago, when he categorically stated that he would surrender police power to Vice President Leni Robredo for six months.

Vice President Robredo, who by the way deserves our congratulations for being a two-time Vice President election winner in the same elections, had commented that Duterte’s war on drugs has been ineffective and needs “tweaking.” VP Robredo may as well have said that Duterte’s war on drugs needs “twerking,” because no amount of tweaking can possibly fix something so fundamentally broken and so breathtakingly lopsided as Duterte’s fake ware on drugs.

Maybe they can go to Sen. Tolentino for some pointers on that “twerking” part.

Naturally, Duterte almost immediately took back his offer, claiming that he never offered to surrender anything. Because, of course, our nationally-elected gas lighter would. It is typical Duterte. Say one thing one day, say something completely different, even polarly opposite, the next day. Or say one thing and then let Presidential Spokesperson Sal Panelo give his “interpretation,” which would be everything except what Duterte actually said.

VP Robredo, for her part, has handled Duterte’s fumbling deftly, pointing out that there would have been no need to pass the buck had Duterte’s war on drugs actually been successful. After all, if Duterte’s war on drugs worked, what would Duterte be giving to Robredo to fix?

I expect Duterte’s propaganda machinery to go into overdrive over the next few days, with spins of how Duterte was so “gracious” in offering VP Robredo a chance to prove herself right (even if she was just echoing Duterte’s own words on how his war on drugs is a failure), or how Duterte’s “laban-bawi” offer was “strategy” to throw the delawan off (which to be fair is plausible; after all nothing throws off rational people than irrational actions), or how Duterte is just the Best President In The Solar System.!!!

Sorry DDS trolls, no Undas vacation leaves for you. Don’t complaint to me over my social media accounts, I don’t make your rules. But hey, at least you get holiday pay.

Perhaps, the most revealing aspect to this whole brouhaha is how easy it is for Duterte to becomes instantly defensive and abrasive when his failures are brought to the fore.

Ultimately, Duterte has no one to blame but himself. It was Duterte who made these ridiculous promises, all within his irrational where-on-earth-did-that-come-from timeframe of “3-6 months.” It was Duterte who kept acting tough and making himself seem every bit the problem solver that he isn’t. It was Duterte who promised heaven for Filipinos. And the DDS bought into the hype and propaganda.

Ironically, it is the rest of Filipino society, the rest of us who aren’t so easily sold on hype, who are the ones now clamoring for Duterte to deliver on his promises.

Yet, whenever we do, the DDS are quick to respond with:

“Edi wow, ikaw na ang magaling, ikaw na lang kaya maging Presidente?”

Sana nga. If nothing else, 20,000 Filipinos, whose only real fault was being poor and defenseless, might still be alive.