The millstone around Joe Biden's neck

t is barely four days to the US presidential elections on November 3, 2020. Still the most prudent assessment among many political observers is that the contest remains an unpredictable toss-up.

   Polls, at least the conventionally trustworthy ones, have Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in gaps larger than the margin of error. But statistics, as they say, are like a string bikini: it reveals the suggestive by concealing the vital.  The polls are a sampling of national sentiment and are not very accurate barometers of local voting predisposition. Unfortunately, all politics is local.  The US president is not elected at large, but by majority proportional representation--the electoral college system. Getting the biggest number of votes does not guarantee victory. Getting the widest geographic support does. Loosely speaking, a candidate must look to win more states, not more votes.  

   It's kind of like the Olympics. Even a small nation with only 50 athletes, each one competing in one event, can become overall champion against countries with huge thousand-man delegations competing in the same events if the athletes from the smaller nation win more events.  It's not about how many and how noisy your group is, it's how many medals you total up at the end of the races.

   It's even much trickier in politics. There is usually no universal issue that swings voting opinion uniformly across all fifty states. Even so, candidates never give up trying to  define and campaign by those elusive universal issues--Joe Biden does. If you listen to Biden, he paints a panoramic canvas, using broad brush strokes. He talks about fighting for the "soul of the nation" and "vindicating the spirit of America" and appealing to moralists to anchor their reckoning on the "character of the man."  He then invites comparison between him and Trump on those terms. 

   Donald Trump, in contrast, is happy as a clam just scaring the bejezus out of rural yokels over waning industries and vanishing jobs. Don't look now but Biden's motherhood platitudes are slowly fading behind Trump's frantic wolf-crying. It's not about elegance and class but whatever slogan works best.  The sad reality is that the  average man on the street gets his opinion from the bumper sticker with the brightest colors. 

   I do think Joe Biden is more likeable, just watching Donald Trump strutting about with his goofy antics makes your skin crawl. But that's not about character. It's just photogenic-telegenic-cybergenic value, that's all.

   What's dangerous is that beneath this thin veneer of endearment, there are some serious questions about Joe Biden's character too that have somehow escaped close scrutiny--either by purpose or  lucky happenstance.

   I expected the Republicans to pound Joe Biden hard on the questionable affairs of his son Hunter Biden. But they let him off the hook, I think,  because they're just too busy or tired  to sink their teeth into the details. They stopped at the general portrayal of sordidness, but didn't have the time or the inclination to indict Hunter Biden before the bar of public opinion.

   Worse, they oversimplified it. If you didn't research any deeper, you'd think Hunter Biden was some drug-dependent teenage bum dropped out of school, hanging by Daddy's coattails, landing cushy jobs way above his skillset level and riding a golden parachute to early retirement.

  Not exactly so. The man is a fullfledged lawyer--not a high school dropout. He served a full five-year term (not a scandal-abbreviated one) in the board of directors of Burisma, Inc. a private energy development company (not a Ukrainian state corporation). About the most eyebrow-raising thing about that whole situation is he happens to be the son of the US Vice president Joe Biden at the time. So the potential for influence-peddling was certainly there.

   But there wasn't any earthshaking outrage about it, except among a limited circle of ovethinking Republican strategists who, try as they did, simply couldn't package the whole thing as a sensational-enough scandal.

  Back in the halcyon days of nobler politics in America, this could have been enough to trigger at least a 500-word article in the New York Times, or an episode of 60 Minutes. That's because in that genteel era of propriety in public office, the existence of actual corruption is not required. Even the mere whiff or suggestion of wrongdoing is enough to draw widespread public contempt. 

   That onion-skin criteria for public disdain is gone, in no small measure thanks to Donald Trump himself. ln fact, for a long time to come in US government, I suspect many US presidents will be able to get away with a million things short of murder. Just because the 45th president did horrendously worse before them.

   Just the same, I think Hunter Biden--who served in Burisma's board from 2014 to 2019 (April) could have done better.  If he thought there was nothing improper with him working for a company with no business dealings with the American government, he should have seized the initiative to claim high ground. He should have made his exit from Burisma much louder and blatant, inviting rather than deflecting attention from it.  He didn't, he opted to slowly fade away from public view--no doubt upon the advise of Democrat strategists applying "less talk, less mistake; no talk no mistake." But he left behind a telling confession that even he believed his surname "Biden" was all the Burisma stockholders read off his resumé to bequeath him with a US$50,000 monthly paying job just doing basically one thing: being Biden.  You'd think Hunter could have said something--anything--to assuage the ethical community that he didn't draw pay as a wallflower. But he kept mum. 

   On a limited scale, playing possum was a successful strategy because it deprived Donald Trump of a piñata he could have been whacking all throughout  the campaign. That successfully diminished the attraction value of corruption as an issue against Joe Biden. He had a choice between telling his son to man up and explain, or to shut up and don't rock the boat. He preferred the latter. That is character clue right there.

   On the other hand, it could be that Americans, in general, couldn't care less about a less-than-shocking involvement of a non-government official (Hunter Biden held no public office) in a non-transaction that involved no American taxpayer dollar. In 1984, Ron Reagan--son of US President Ronald Reagan--appeared in a TV commercial endorsing the American Express credit card company. People thought it was cute, certainly not outrageous. Even today, Donald Trump makes no effort to ensure that  the involvement of Ivanka, Eric and Donald, Jr. in state affairs is discrete or even nondescript.

   By and large that's the real reason why the Hunter Biden non-exposé simply couldn't get much traction even among the most cynical pundits. With Donald Trump hurling all the mud, it's simply too much of a teapot calling the kettle blacker. 

   But having said that, Hunter Biden would continue to attract controversy in a Joe Biden administration.  The question used to be what was Hunter Biden's lobbying hitch on his father (the vice-president) for a company he is actually connected with?

   Now it will be what is Hunter Biden's lobbying hitch with his father, the President, for all companies (not just Burisma) whose connections with him are now invisible? That creates a dilemma for Joe Biden. If he hearkens to his own moral standards of principled politics, he must not appoint Hunter Biden to any government position, certainly not a position in his cabinet.  But that keeps Hunter Biden an undeniably well-connected lobbyist lurking in the shadows, unaccountable to no one.  

   Presidential children in contemporary times are always a tough challenge to handle. Barack and Michele Obama managed to keep Sasha and Maliya out of the political crosshairs by talking little about them. Doing even better, Bill and Hilllary Clinton shielded Chelsea from public view so jealously she was Washington's fleeting unicorn, hardly even seen by anyone.  Hunter Biden has a shot to be Joe Biden's mythical Yeti, the Bigfoot--except everybody with a big bore rifle goes out of his way to try catch the poor thing. Hunter will find himself the hunted all throughout Daddy's term. And Daddy will always think of him as the millstone around his neck he simply can't get rid of.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Damaged goods: the gargantuan repair job facing America

t a rally in central Georgia Friday, Donald Trump let out a subtle Freudian slip when he mused that if he loses to Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential race he just might leave the country.

   It's a classic joke people tell in a situation when life has become unbearable in all respects that only a total change of environment promises a sporting chance of surviving. Or you did something so terribly embarrassing that you can't bear the thought of meeting anybody who knows you and what you've done. So you want to be some place else where no one can recognize you.

   First of all, if there were microbes in Mars they'd be able to recognize Donald Trump. The man's notoriety is universal.  Great statesmen labor their entire lives painstakingly crafting a body of work that defines their legacy. But not Donald Trump, he doesn't even have to try. He is remembered for everything he did, and adds daily to that bottomless archive of faux pas with everything he does. 

   Winston Churchill was the icon of British stiff-upper lip feistiness in the face of daunting adversity. He personified utter defiance to the enemy, and an irreverence towards insurmountable odds. He was the kind of man who, finding himself aboard a plane about to crash, would be sitting out on the wing flapping his arms. If Donald Trump had only applied that kind of gutsiness against the corona virus, he could start arranging the chairs for his reelection inaugural ball by now.

   The fact that he envisions being incompatible with American society if he loses  shows the great disconnect between pre- and post-Trump America. In four short years, he managed to totally deconstruct the United States of America that it is now virtually unrecognizable abroad. Worse, nobody bothers to make an effort to distinguish America from Donald Trump.  To the community of nations, Donald Trump is America--because that's what even the Americans conditioned themselves to believe. Donald Trump appropriated the state's brand for himself and no one could stop him. No one would even try.

   For example, no US President has ever accepted his party's nomination standing under the porticos of the Whitehouse. It's not a simple matter of inappropriate venue. The cold fusion between the man, his office and his party sends the message that the American president is rather like God: an inseparable Trinity---the essence of one is the substance of all three. 

   Some of that is actually true, from the legal standpoint. A sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution because he is the head of the state which enacts the law giving the right to prosecute. There can be no right against the authority that enacted the law that gave the right.  Of course the man is not the state. But the President--especially in a federal setup--is the point of singularity common to all the states. For all practical intents and purposes, the Chief Executive is the State. If you have doubts about that, provoke a state to war and watch which top government official  will command the military forces that will vanquish your challenge. However, this comixtion between man and office is short-lived. 

   The moment a president steps down from office, he can be indicted for anything from a traffic ticket to genocide.  He loses the cloak of immunity because that is not personal garment he can bring home. Stripped of the armor of state invincibility, a former president goes back to parity with the ordinary citizen because that's all he is now.

   Public office is a public trust. No man ascends public office because of his personal virtue, but because he represents a system of values that his political party publicly stands for. Before a man can aspire for high office, he must first pass muster by the vetting criteria of his political party. 

   This is where the American model of democracy is worthy of copying; It simplified political philosophy by splitting it into two poles--thesis and anti-thesis. It is not difficult to distinguish the Republican from the Democratic party. You don't need to study both systems--only one, keeping in mind that the other party stands for the opposite of everything.

   There are proud innovators around the world that think they can experiment with homegrown hybrid models of democracy that comes in  "Fifty Shades of Grey." The Philippines, with its multi-party system complicated by highly-manipulable sectoral partylist representatives, is one of them. 

   But in America, social and political principles are strictly black-and-white. The Democrats stand for social welfare, trade unionism, soak-the-rich taxation, planned parenthood, immigration tolerance and global free trade, among other things. Republicans, the opposite: personal insurance, big business, pass-on taxation and tax breaks, anti-abortion, restricted borders and trade protectionism.

   Someone who carries a party's official nomination pledges to run the government with these philosophical filters when he shoots for the unionwide mandate. However, it has rarely happened that all fifty US states toe the same  party line (Ronald Reagan came very close, winning 49 of all 50 states in his re-election in 1984), so that even the political party is still only a moral subset of the body politic, the entirety of which is invested in the presidency.

   The correlation is therefore clear: a man is only a component of his  political party, which is only a component of the  presidency,  which is only a component of the Government, which is only an element of the federal United States. 

   That is not Donald Trump's understanding. To him, "when you are President your power is total."  That's why he speaks of the State in the first person, warning several times that if state governors do not act, he (not the State) will act. Donald Trump warns of a looming tide of socialism when his own administration is nothing short of despotism. There's only one dictator America needs to be leery about, and it's Donald Trump. And he doesn't even understand what all  dictators do:  that they only rule roughshod over frightful humans--viruses generally ignore them. 

   If Donald Trump loses this November, it is not only he who might find comfort in the thought of moving to another country. America will find its own government and political system shredded to strands, its dynamics out of level and plumb it would need nothing short of a total overhaul. Even if they don't pack their bags and follow Trump, they would still be wondering, "What country are we in now?"

   Systems of checks-and-balances have to be retrieved from storage and dusted off. Vital offices left vacant have to be cranked back to life--starting with reviving several inspector general (IG) offices slain in record numbers by Trump.

   The State department probably has to do an inventory of America's foreign policy initiatives and commitments that were left in limbo by "America First"  It has to count how many treaties and international agreements the US has either breached or completely forgotten. It might even have to do a headcount of exactly how many allies it still has left, and reevaluate its posturing in the many theaters of conflict around the world, especially the middle east.  

   The US has catch-up work to do on climate change and global warming. If it puts a little effort into it, America might even remember it used to stand for human rights protection and the eradication of poverty and world hunger--tough to do when it has starved the very body that was fighting it, the United Nations with its FAO relief missions. It might finally awaken from its COVID-19 stupor and think about picking up the slack in the international campaign to fight this existentialist threat to the human race--again, tough to do after it castrated the World Health Organization.

   Whatever the social and political landscape would look like in a post-Trump America,  the post-deconstruction repair work the nation faces will make everyone Trump leaves behind envy his luxury of a quick escape plan.

   If I were Donald Trump's campaign strategist, for lack of any better alternatives, I would advise him to tailor his campaign speeches this way: "In 2016 I told you I'm the only one with the solutions. Well, folks, not everything went as planned. Which is why you should vote for me again, because I'm the only one who can fix the mess I made.  You don't want to be the one to do it!"Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Why the US won't lift a finger to curb China

n full view of the international community, China is working overtime to expand its fortifications in the South China Sea. Vigorous protests by other littoral states around  the disputed waters are not deterring, or even slowing down, China's relentless campaign to extend its southern sea border.  

   Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Taiwan and the Philippines have all loudly objected to China's action. Among them, the Philippines has the strongest  legal basis. In 2016 it won a ruling from the UN Arbitral Tribunal on the Law of the Sea recognizing its 200-mile exclusive economic zone along the country's western seaboard. 

   Predictably, China does not honor the ruling. It had  boycotted the Tribunal's proceedings as early as 2013. 

   There is no practical way to enforce the ruling. The Tribunal is the adjudicating arm of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an international treaty to which China is not a signatory. None of the signatories, all liliputian states with no blue water navies, has the power to make China comply.

   This revives an old debate on whether of not "international law" is true law. The essence of law is that all those subject to it surrender their right to a central power that can impose sanctions. This works well in a homogeneous society, where a citizenry submits to a central terror called the State. The principles of government  are  a direct application of the social contract theory.

 But this mechanism runs into trouble when the subjects of law are themselves states, and the central authority nothing but a secretriat--all just particles of the states they represent. Then you have a "central authority" that is weaker than even the individual client states  comprising its constituency. 

  In general, that is also the defect of the United Nations. Envisioned as a superbody that can whip belligerent states into line, in reality it is hostage to the whims and caprice of the powerful Security Council. This supergang of the world's superpowers, in turn, makes the General Assembly nothing but a noisy rubberstamp.  The routinely  notable  achievement of the UN has been to bully the governments of small states when they threaten the interests of the world's superpowers. There is even a more cynical view that the UN body is but a venue for horsetrading among the superpowers,  with the smaller states of the rest of the world being the medium of exchange. 

   We are no longer living in the age of maritime discovery. Every square inch of this planet has been mapped and claimed by the sovereignty of states. There are no more unclaimed territories anywhere. This makes discovery and occupation of frontierlands not just obsolete but non-existent modes of drawing territorial boundaries. At the same time, uniform technology has made many nations' armies practically equal in capability. Any marked difference in war capability between two militaries, is likely to be between neighboring states. Even a strong army in one hemisphere is not going to deploy forces to subjugate a weaker army in the other hemisphere. The  few small wars  raging in  sporadic conflict theaters of the world today are notably wars of annexation--far from the colossal  campaigns for colonization of the last century.

   With international borders now set permanently all around the globe, wars for territory are a thing of the past. More than that, expansionism is no longer possible. Even with paramount force, a conquering state will not only have to contend with the defense put up by the state it is trying to engulf. It must also earn recognition of its prize from the international community which would predictably frown upon any unilateral action that threatens the peace among nations. 

   In 2019,  US President Donald Trump broached the preposterous idea of the United States launching a bid to buy Greenland. The idea is eclipsed for its asinine achievement  only by Trump's ensuing antic of cancelling a meeting with Denmark's prime minister who had politely derided the idea. More than the cerebral emptiness of Trump, what this showed was the utter impossibility today for a nation even as powerful as the United States to increase territory even by the transactional approach. Greenland is clearly unattainable because it is inhabited territory. You can buy land but not people, not in the post-Slave Trade dispensation.

   More than anything, this is what emboldens China in its accelerated artificial island creation program in the South China Sea. After all, the controversial waters are already named after it, studding it with islands only seems par for the course.  It is not displacing large human settlements--because there are none--the habitable islands that will eventually host living communities are precisely under construction.

This is significant in one other sense. Without people in these aborning original landmasses, there cannot be a dire alarm against China exporting communism, or any other ideology. This was the clarion call in the heels of the Chinese Cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976. The West obsessed with the fear of seeing fledgling southeast Asian states in China's frontyard fall to communism.  First North Vietnam, North Korea and then their corresponding South counterparts--and eventually all neighboring countries around China would fall to communism like dominos.

   This "Domino Theory" was all the justification the US needed to sponsor the Vietnam war, as hawks in the US Congress led by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy trafficked in anti-communism hysteria back home.

   Arguably, political awareness as well as disorientation in the US today are as closely similar as they can be to what they were in 1966. The most engaging issues are the same: racial inequality, holocaust revisitations, deep partisan divisions and popular preoccupation with conspiracy theories.  Donald Trump has even rediscovered the undying sellability of the socialist scare. Will these conditions guarantee that China's march to consolidate its "Nine Dash Line" extended boundary will meet counterbalancing check from the US a second time?

   No. First of all, American foreign policy under Donald Trump is not propelled by ideology. The only idea he seems to espouse is self-survival and he is open to any practical philosophy that leverages his campaign to remain in the Whitehouse. Up to now, I still can't reconcile how he tries to scare Americans about the reinvasion  of the American political landcape by socialism, while bragging at the same time that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un are "in love."  

   Mostly, all that Trump is trying to show off is his ability to perform cheap stunts generally considered difficult to do--like posing for photo-ops with the reclusive leaders of hermit states, legendary Cold War  spy kings like Vladimir Putin, or hyper-aloof Saudi royalty. There is no cohesive philosophy underlying his actions other than what would impress a global audience. His "America First" slogan is a poor attempt to redefine America's Manifest Destiny core principle by adding the dollar sign on either end of it.  Whereas the American government and society once considered it the national mission to promote and defend democracy around the world, now it must do so mindful of the costs of such undertaking and avoiding it anytime the calculations show no tangible returns from its investment.

   The South China Sea dispute is a perfect example. In the Trumpian philosophy, there is nothing to be gained from standing in the way of China asserting its dominance in the part of the world where it is unchallenged to begin with. Some misty-eyed US nationalists hearkening back to the age of Manifest Destiny might demand that China continue to respect "freedom of navigation" in the high seas. But China has the most to gain in promoting traffic through its blue waterways. Its export trade and importation of oil depend on transit through secure sea lanes. The only vessels fussing about "freedom of navigation" are US warships--en route to where? America has no more significant extraterritorial interests in Asia. Its aircraft carrier battle groups pursue missions that mostly involve sitting anchored in the midst of troubled waters to serve as relics of US military intimidation.  Even in the unlikely event of a military conflict developing between US and China, China is more likely to lure floating US war materiel into the ambush zone rather than keeping them out of it. 

   Containing China's expansionism requires for a venue a war theater outside of Chinese sovereignty--like another Vietnam. Carpet-bombing Hanoi was meant to send the signal to communist China to stay out of Saigon. The existence of a proxy client-state is essential for hitting Chinese interest without hitting China itself. In the present dispute, America finds itself in the unfamiliar situation of being armed to the teeth with no enemy to attack. There is no Vietnam nearby.

   Besides, it is not territorial expansionism but economic multilateralism led by China that presents the most serious existentialist threat to the US today. Tariff wars are the modern-day equivalent of military showdowns,  economic sanctions the virtual expression of naval blockades. There will still be wars among states in the modern era, but these will be over mutual efforts to cripple one another's ability to carry out the lifeblood activities within their own economies. 

   Donald Trump tried his hand at playing "wartime President" with the war against COVID-19. He learned that as in any war, it is the soldiers who fight them who are hailed as heroes, not the presidents who command them. Frontliners and first responders became the toast of grateful celebrations by the American press. That robbed Donald Trump of media exposure, and he hated being relegated to the background. 

   Even if China were to construct an entire new continent in the South China Sea, Trump knows fighting a war over it is bad TV. He could barely manage the interminable wars in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan despite the fact that these conflicts strike a very effective panic chord in conservative America: the agenda to roll back Islamic extremism.  A hawkish president can always beat the war drums to the staccato strokes of  Islamophobia, but if he starts dropping bombs on Chinese zen Buddhists, peace icons of popular culture, his popularity rate would drop even faster than the bombs. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

What Would Jesus Tweet?

t's time to address the elephant in the room. The strong support of certain Christian groups for Donald Trump has perplexed the community of the biblical faithful for a long time. But many of them have remained circumspect in their critique, for no better reason I could think of than keeping the peace. There's no point--or at least nothing to be gained--in questioning the revelation of others in regard to the secular workings of government. You would only be pitting preacher against preacher and be forced to resort to unbelievable contortionism of the Scriptures to buttress your theory. Many have tried before and ended up simply talking past each other, resolving little and explaining even less.

   The heathen, unbound by inner self-conflicts of religious doctrine, have the enviable ease of dismissing the whole thing simply as a function of demographics. The WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) have traditionally been a conservative bailiwick (thus leaning Republican), just as more progressive pentecostals tended to be more liberal (thus leaning Democratic). 

   However, oversimplistic criteria like that have failed to capture the presumptive persuasion in other issues, ranging from race relations, civil rights, equal opportunity or affirmative action. Take slavery alone, the moral-philosophical divide that distinguished the two sides of the Civil War. Industrial north abhorred slave labor, agricultural south thought it was indispensable.  And yet Southern Democrats were some of the biggest advocates of preserving the institution of slavery. It took a Republican president--Abraham Lincoln--to end it.

   Atheists and agnostics--and who doesn't know one?--completely write off the moral element in this community's common conviction. In their view, evangelicals supporting Trump is no great mystery at all. After all, Donald Trump--and this will tickle him pink--is an angel compared to the ruthless kings of God's chosen people. 

   Only two of the first four kings of the United Kingdom (of Israel, not Great Britain!)  David and his son Solomon were considered "righteous." The other two, Saul and his son Ishbosheth were fencesitters, if not downright evil. David's adultery with Batsheba was made possible by his murder of her first husband Uriah. Even Donald Trump's legendary libido couldn't possibly top that. And Solomon's harem of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines makes Donald Trump look like a celibate monk.

   After unified Israel divided into two kingdoms in 925 BC, the bible itself evaluated as "righteous"  only 8 out of 20 kings of the southern kingdom of Judah, and only 1 out of 19 kings of the northern kingdom of Israel. 

   All of that is not even surprising in the overall scheme of things as far as being "evil" goes. A friend of mine Ray Salvosa for whose intellectual mettle I have a very high regard posits that God himself was the first international terrorist. For years, he kept pointing out to me that if the idea of terrorism is to visit violence upon the state to obtain concessions for a largish oppressed underclasss, then what else would you call God's ten plagues on Pharaoh to liberate nearly three million Israelite slaves?

   Old Testament accounts of the war exploits of Israel's marauding army against all its neighbors are a grisly chronicle of genocide that will shame any modern-day intifadah by comparison. 

   But the rest of the bible present some of the noblest, most moving images of love and self-sacrifice. The most poignant of these is the defining theology of Christianity itself--God acquiescing to the crucifixion of His own son to atone for a humanity that, left to their own device, could love neither Him nor the son He sacrificed.   

   The point is, neither the predisposition to do good or historic propensity to do bad  is a reliable metric to gauge the Christian position in explaining why it supports unlikely champions like Donald Trump.  And, maybe, that is the key to breaking the code.   Maybe Christianity had nothing to do with how Christians engage their politics at all.

   There is at least uncontroverted biblical proof that Jesus demurred from political discussions.  "Tell us then, what is your opinion, is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?" the Pharisees asked him. Jesus didn't spring for the chance to do a seminar on God and Politics, instead dismissing them,"Why are you trying to trap me?" (Matt. 22:17,18). 

   I have heard many preachings that say the ensuing conversation between Jesus and the people who asked him that question is the instruction manual for Christian political engagement, "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." I realize that for years, even I have been teaching that to my students in law school as the basis for the separation of Church and State.  

   In fact, we all missed the point that while the Roman coin bearing Caesar's image does belong to Caesar, Caesar himself as every other molecule in the universe belongs to God. There is no divide between Christian and secular because there is only creation and one Creator.  Whether you subscribe to this idea or not is immaterial. 

   You either believe that God exists and stands for good, or He doesn't exist, period.  Because if we allow the idea that God can be evil--or can countenance the ways of evil--then the atheists are correct: there is no point in having a God at all.  Who wants to serve an evil God? In fact, what would distinguish service to an evil God from service to the devil?  God can only be good and everything you do in His name can only be set in a framework consistent with his perfect goodness.

   If a believer of God claims that his political opinion is informed by his understanding of the character of God, then he cannot justify the defects of his human political idol by saying there have been more wicked men in the bible. That is moral cowardice. Man up and say you support an evil person but don't charge your decision to a holy God.  That was your human choice and God had no part in it. So evangelical Christians who support unrighteous leaders are not doing anything unique or original. The stiff-necked Israelites of the Old Testament have supported more ungodly kings. But to say that modern times now make collaboration between light and dark acceptable is heresy from ancient days.

   There were no elections and no campaigning for public office during the time of Jesus.  The Christian, therefore,  who claims to lean on the bible for the wisdom of his electoral choice is leaning on air. And even though it is purely speculative, we know plenty from all over Scripture what Jesus' exacting standard would have been in choosing any king: find one that is in the image and mold of God. Or come as close as you can get.

   Is it any wonder, then, that Donald Trump goes before the Christian community claiming he is the Anointed One--short of the spitting image of God Himself? No.

   What is a  wonder is the fact that some in that community believe him. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

How would we return to a world without Trump?

f Donald Trump loses this November, it is not only American politics that will shift dramatically from the state of flux that it has been in since 2016. The rest of the world will find itself adjusting to a likely return to certain old realities that were frozen in time by Trumpism. When the thaw is complete, the new American leadership will confront the challenge of addressing key agenda in world politics that the circus of Donald Trump's time in office had overshadowed.

   Trump was a tour de force of distraction. Whatever global issue was of the essence at any time, the injection of Donald Trump into the intricate calculus of the issue robbed it of substance for discussion. Instead, people would end up only talking about the uninformed arrogance of the US president. The primacy of America's role as leader of the free world took a backseat to the triviality of coming to terms with Donald Trump's leviathan-proportioned ego.

   Take climate change, for instance. The moment Trump subscribed to the mental feed that the green doctrine was an American job killer, the international  environmental policy dialogue became a venue for multilateral trade wars instead. Instead of world governments thinking "how can we contribute to efforts to cool the sweltering planet?" they were pied-pipered by Trump to think, "how do we make sure we're not being one-upped by our fellow conservationists?"  

   From a progressive philosophy that did not think in terms of proportional response to a challenge, nations were bamboozled by Trumpism to think "from each according to his means to each according to his needs" which is as Marxist-socialist as you can ever get. But that is Trump's philosophy--he just doesn't know it.  He thinks along the line, "If America is going to put money on climate change, what's in it for America in return?  And it better not be break-even."  Any calculation that shows the United States spending more on anything than it is getting out of it in return, to him, is not in keeping with "America First."  Quantitatively, if America's benefit from an initiative is "X" then America must invest only "X" in pushing that initiative.  

   But that's not how international multilateral initiative is supposed to work.   For that matter, that's not how any team works. Imagine if LeBron James said,"Hey. there's five of us on the floor, why should I do most of the scoring?"  Indeed, if the team won, he doesn't get to keep the trophy for himself, he has to share it with the rest of the other players,"That's just not fair!"  

   It is not fair from the standpoint of effort, but it is the only way to get the job done from the standpoint of harnessing available capability. If LeBron insisted on scoring no more than the lowest scorer in the roster, his team would never win. 

    If the industrial leaders of the world--foremost of which is the United States--are not willing to carry a disproportionately heavier load in the climate agenda, then the liliputians like East Timor, Myanmar, Vietnam, and all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa are certainly not capable of  saving the day. Donald Trump cannot see that, which is why for the last four years the US has not lifted a finger while the mercury rose and the polar ice caps melted.

   That same philosophy informs his standoffish attitude towards NATO. Why should America pick up the lion's share of the tab? No one could explain to Trump that NATO was America's common brainchild with Great Britain, whose ultimate goal was to prevent world War III. Another world war would replicate America's contribution to the casualty rate in the last world war. The same goes with the United Nations whose central organizing principle is the outlawing of war itself. Why should the US pay more for the UN's upkeep? Simply because it was renamed from the League of Nations which was an American invention. 

   This transactional  philosophy is also what that guided his aloofness towards the European Community. If The Europeans are not going to let more refugees in, why should the US relax its border guards down south? Trump has inoculated the developed world with the virus of xenophobia that even the traditionally circumspect Great Britain became inflamed with Brexit fever, trying to channel Trumpian dogma that a modern state should be hermetically sealed against immigrants from "shit hole" countries.  

   Trumpian philosophy relegated the Palestinians into a spectator's role as Israel, the United States and the cartel of moderate Arab States, signed Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives--with everybody signing on the dotted line except the Palestinians.

   Trump assassinated Iran's greatest army general in hopes of provoking an Iranian-backed terrorist backlash that would have aligned the international community squarely behind the US. A well-laid out plan, but the wily Iranians didn't bite the bait.

   For four years under Donald Trumps first term, America exercised the antithetical opposite of the Midas touch: everything it touched turned to rust instead of gold. The problem is the whole world, albeit involuntarily, had been forced to reconfigure all of its operating dynamics to thrive in a Trumpian world. If Trump loses the election, he leaves behind a dystopian world order shaped by global reaction to his irrational geopolitics.  He is the picture of a rabblerouser in "gen pop" in a crowded prison.   After he has triggered the riot of universal ultranationalism between states, walking away from the riot does not instantly stop the orgy of killing he leaves behind.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

   

Obfuscating the obvious: how to speak to be misquoted

here's something to be said of the ability to be vague enough that you can be accurately undefinitive.

   Apparently it's the new normal in today's political dialogue, a takeoff from the classical idea of a politician being someone whose feet are "firmly planted in mid-air." The Whitehouse does it--so often if not all the time--but so do all of its critics. The premium is on being able to say black-and-white without producing grey. It has to be cleverly crafted so that you can say later "I meant black when you thought I said white" and vice versa. It makes you sound like a person of conviction while vascillating between two conflicting positions. What the hell do I mean by that?

   See, that last paragraph is a perfect example. It said a lot without really saying anything. The point is gone are the days of straightshooting fellows who left no doubt in your mind what they meant by what they said. More importantly, there was a time when you could hold a person to his words, and that person looked for no convenient escape not to be held accountable.  

   But then came the ubiquitous invention of forked-tongue language, the phrase "at your own risk."  Are Chinese biotech stocks a good investment? They're worth the value you assign to them "at your own risk." Is air travel safe now with social distancing factors evident in folding down middle seats? Transmission remains a distinct possibility to be considered "at your own risk."   Should I refinance my mortgage or avail of a buy-out for a loss? Liabilities equate with either option taken "at your own risk." You don't need to have experienced any of these personally, you can just take note that I said so at your own risk."

   Another way that people obfuscate is to remove the human element from the picture. You never say anymore that "Police officer John Doe beat up black guy so and so with a nightstick, he could be fired"  Instead, it's "Law enforcement made a mistake that resulted in regrettable injury for which appropriate sanction is now under review."  

   Apparently, President Donald Trump was already COVID-contagious when he insisted on attending an indoor fundraising event in New Jersey and everyone among the boatload of characters surrounding him knew it.  When pressed by reporters who greenlighted the risky move, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said  that Whitehouse operations determined that it was safe for the president to travel, Secret Service made appropriate plans,  Whitehouse operations authorized the execution of that plan. Translation: Donald Trump said "I wanna go!" and everybody said. "Yes, sir!"

   The reason COVID-19 is proving intractable is because everybody have removed the human element--especially human freewill--from the transmission chain. More than a million people worlwide and  210,000 Americans among them  have been killed by this deadly virus. Really?

   "Kill" is a verb, an action word. It connotes intent and intent requires will. If you left the virus alone in the petri dish--or better yet in its natural commensal host in the wild--the virus wouldn't "kill" anyone or anything. When a person drowns, we don't say the water killed him.  We say his lack of foresight or lack of skill killed him. He is a victim of his own reckless imprudence. Or the reckless imprudence of people supposed to look out for them.  The COVID-19 pandemic is not the runaway triumph of a biogenetic enemy, it is the colossal failing of human common sense.  

   The virus doesn't fly, although it can be flung into the air when we exhale. We release the virus the same way we release carbon dioxide into our personal space. However, since our personal space moves with us, and we move around, we move the virus around. It doesn't move around by itself. We are the vectors. We don't spread the virus so much as we spread ourselves.  Is it any wonder that the only means that has proven effective in slowing down the spread so far are human-rights violative lockdowns?

   Again we say the economy will rebound when the virus disappears. Don't look now but the virus is actually creating a new underground economy--several sub-economies, as a matter of fact. Never has the internet been more festooned with devices of free enterprise than today. Even working from home is spawning growth in a reborn door-to-door delivery service industry--at first only of food and small mechandise, but now of all kinds of chattel. If it has mass and occupies space, anything tangible, it can be at your doorstep in a few swipes of an iPhone or Android app.   All those people meeting on zoom have got to eat too, you know. 

   The point is, the economy is not taking a beating. You can't dismiss it that simply.  People are the economy and people are  busy fighting back. They could use some help, some stimulus to take the place of so much economic infrastructure they can't access for the timebeing.

   But actioon is stymied by fear of accountability, and nowhere is this more evident than in the highest policy-making levels of governments across the globe, not just the United States.  It's hard to believe that given the severity of this global pandemic, the United Nations is not holding continuous emergency sessions of the General Assembly right now. What would it take to really unite the whole world against a common threat? A meteor on its way to blowing the planet Earth to smithereens?

   Where does humanity go from here? It's hard to say given that "all forces are in feverish search for a holistic solution" and will leave "no stone unturned."  Words used to matter, because words are the precursor to action. 

   I make one notable exception: Dr. Anthony Fauci whose words are so simple, so blatant and perhaps too explicit billions of peopole can't understand it: "Please wear a mask." Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Trump is really infected, here's how we know

The image from the Whitehouse press pool is grainy because
the photographer had to shoot with a telephoto lens. He had to
stand a little ways back from the president who is now contagious
--perhaps the first real clue that this infection is not staged.

don't mean to suggest that Donald Trump's COVID-19 infection is only a trumped-up claim, no pun intended. If anything, his positive test certainly took long in coming considering how much he has flaunted safety precautions against this disease. The announcement that he tested positive is even anti-climactic, given that he said he was already put on a hydroxy-chloroquine regimen several weeks ago. 

   Besides, as he likes to say, Washington "leaks like a sieve" and a grand conspiracy to fake COVID-19 infection of a patient as high-profile as POTUS is like a million "inside story" books waiting to be written to compete for the New York best sellers list. When you have that many people jostling for position to be the first to spring the blow-by-blow account, it's impossible to keep the lid on a plot so sinister.

   The infection is real, of that we can be sure. Now the aftermath unfolding is ringing all kinds of dinner bells for the hunter of more true conspiracy theories. It is not helped by the fact that the Whitehouse continuously fires off these bursts of chaff to divert all incoming missiles. Depending on the time of day, or the audience being addressed, characterizations of the president's condition cover the whole range from sick as a guppy to strong as an ornery bull.  What gives?

   First of all, someone getting sick of COVID-19 is as newsy as someone getting wet because he walked under the rain. More than 35 million people worldwide  have contracted the disease--over one million have died. In the US alone the number of infections as of today, October 4, 2020, is north of seven million, with 209,000 victims dying.  Each one got no more than passing mention and two lines in an obituary. However, there were a few exceptions whose death the world somewhat took notice of. 

   Dr. Li Wenliang died after contracting the virus on a Friday, February 7, 2020. He was the Chinese doctor working at the Wuhan viral research laboratory who raised the first alarm that a new strain of a flu-like virus had somehow sprung from the petri dish and could be the progeny of a new global pandemic.  His death is notable but only in hindsight as an abject lesson in believing somebody who makes what lawyers call an "admission against self-interest."  He was healthy enough yet when he made that embarrassing announcement, for which he quickly lost his job. Had anyone stopped to think that maybe he knew much more was at stake than just a lousy job, they would have heard his urgent plaintive message clearer.

   Once the disease was out of control, then came a succession of heroic deaths by other medical personnel all over the world: doctors, nurses, EMT crews, mostly people in the frontlines who faced the front of the pandemic wave, absorbing most of the impact to spare the rest of us standing in total apathy behind them.  Now, we're beginning to take stock of the heroism of these people, but only long after we've cremated their remains. 

   What made for the significance of the deaths of these COVID-19 victims were the circumstances in which they died. They died in our place. You'd think every doctrinaire believer who knows about the concept of substitutionary death would understand. But while the idea is well-accepted  as applied to atonement, we have not  appreciated these lesser mortal heroes enough  just because they only saved our lives and not our souls.  Nevertheless, we still owe it to them to mark their passing with an understanding of the priceless value of human life. Not all of humanity--just one life. One life matters enough.

   That life could even be Donald Trump's. That is why his infection matters, not because he is president of the United States. Because he is human, like the rest of us. It is not democracy that makes us all equal--one man, one vote--we are equal because of our common mortality.  It did not take all the combined military might of the world's armies, or the pooled bullions of the world economies, or the summarized wisdom of all human knowledge to make us realize that vulnerability. All it took is the sub-molecular virus, arguably the simplest creation of God, to make us to come to terms with our human limitation.

   Donald Trump's mantra on the COVID-19 disease was "it's nothing serious." On closer look, his prescription for it was not actually denial, necessarily, but avoidance. Yes, it can make someone sick. But that someone need not be you. It always happens to the other person--and for many that is assurance enough. Just like between two friends who met a grisly bear on a hiking trail. One guy quickly removed his hiking boots and started putting on light rubber sneakers. His friend said, "What are you putting on sneakers for? You can't outrun a grisly bear?!" to which his friend replied, "I'm not trying to outrun the bear, I'm just trying to outrun you!"  Maybe they were not friends, after all.

   The unofficial official policy of "admission and avoidance" by the Trump Administration is what informed every fatal decision it made since early December 2019.  From banning travel in and from China--sort of like locking the barndoors after the horse had been stolen--to refusing to make the wearing of masks mandatory. But the most critical of these mistakes was putting the public on relaxed footing instead of heightened guard. Thus when Donald Trump contracted the virus finally, all the puppet strings are now clearly visible, giving everyone enough time to scramble for PPE. It also erased the buffer for delayed response. People realized that skydivers who jumped out of airplanes with parachutes strapped to their backs generally landed on earth fine. The jury is still out on those who jumped without a parachute and are still in mid-air, because looking up to them from the ground they still seemed to be doing okay. But just wait till they are reunited with terra firma.

   That is Trump's problem. It's a really short jump. With still thirty days to go before the elections,  the world would surely behold how Donald Trump ultimately fares with the disease. The virus is only virulent the first 14 days and whatever popular empathy he is able to generate during the incubation period will be very difficult to stretch for another 15 days after he's supposed to have come out of the woods. That's how we know, finally, that this infection is the real mccoy. Intelligent campaign strategists would have started from election day and counted fourteen days backwards. That is when they should have made the announcement if it was really a red herring. If he was only faking the sickness, it won't matter anymore the day after he had cashed in on the sympathy to hoodwink a few swing voters. Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

 

Now that Trump is COVID-positive

friend chided me last night that she thought I only wrote about negative things. She is correct. Nobody writes about positive things as often and there is a simple explanation for that.

The number of flights all over the world in one day is 102,465. Multiply that number twice you have 204,930 takeoffs and landings everyday. Three airplanes take off or land safely somewhere around the world every single second. You never read about it much in the newspapers or see it in the evening news on TV because it is only that one airplane crashing in a fiery heap that makes it to the headline.

   There is a place you can find good report--it's called the bible. Every other agent of news is a harbinger of gloom and doom. That is not a defect of news--it is its definition.  It is not a question of  positive or negative news content either. A sad event is not guaranteed wide press coverage, especially if it's  the kind that repeats. The fact that 207,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 is not getting as much press now than the coming into the US of the first Ebola patient--we're talking of one person--back in September 30, 2014. 

   It made the news because that one person broke the glass ceiling of complacency. His coming into the US was the end of popular innocence about the dreadful disease. That is the same order of newsworthiness that engendered the announcement of US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump both testing positive for COVID-19.  If the scoffers  were unfazed by the death of 207,000 faceless and nameless people they have neither met nor wiil ever meet, this time the news involved the all-too familiar.  Finally, the President of the United States who has led his nation in denial must fight  the disease he had only confronted with wishful thinking up to this point.  Not only will he now reckon the truth, he now has no choice but to believe it.

   The negative news of their infection is a milestone. It's a refutation of everything Trump said wrong about coronavirus, and an affirmation of everything everyone else said right.  Social distancing, wearing of masks, moratoriums on mass gatherings and a recognition of specific ethno- and socioeconomic vulnerability of certain classes and communities of individuals--all of these will now cease to be mere punchlines. Hopefully, they will now become the defining credo of a more rational policy for public safety protection. It took the diminutive virus a while, but it finally manged to afflict a worthy opponent: an enlightened Donald Trump.

   In the wild, monkeys avoided eating the red berries because its bright color advertised danger. It takes the alpha ape to sample the red berries before the whole gang of simians followed suit and feasted on the bountiful food supply. For months the scientific community had been laying out fields of red berries to fight people's information malnutrition. They were roundly rejected by Donald Trump who chose to espouse a perversion of blind faith, and prophesied that COVID-19 would eventually "go away as if by a miracle." 

   Shades of oracle  talk like that  sits well with his evangelical bailiwick but the virus was not as ecumenical.  Viruses obey God more perfectly than any human believer. They act  as any God-created being does--reproducing themselves in the host. So to humans God gave intelligence to use in constructing a wall between the virus and themselves. That wall was the science of natural medicine. What Donald Trump didn't realize is  rejecting  the science about the disease is a dog whistle  to his cult-like following to reject their best chances of staying healthy--indeed, their best chances of  staying alive. Safe in his biological bunker, with everyone else outside of it, his own protection is not an achievement in improving the prospects for everyone else.  

   Stripped of his biological bunker--a protocol so tight people are tested for COVID-19 days before they face him and get retested for days after--Trump can rely only on true medicine from this point on. There will be no quaffing megadoses of hydroxychloroquine, or shooting Lysol up a palpated vein. There will be no UV lights floodlit into body orifices.  Most of all, there will be no more mockery of the cautiousness that was all  the unvaccinated populace had against a menace no one can see.  If only the enlightenment had come earlier than the infection, doctors would be signing fewer death certificates. But they would be signing much more if the infection had not come at all. 

   Donald Trump, if nothing else just out of residual pride, might still argue with the truth. But he cannot argue with a virus that doesn't care about what he believes or not.  That's what makes this negative development a point of hope ultimately. Knowing that  the outcome at the end of the day is determined by a sovereign higher than both the virus and Donald Trump.   You must not pray for someone to get sick. But when someone's  sickness can pave the way for others' healing, you must not  argue either about who God allowed this thing to happen to.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Trump and twitter: like hand in glove

he most consequential pronouncements today are made on Twitter, that phenomenally-popular app that foists the challenge on people, in so many ways, to summarize the meaning of life in 280 characters or less.  

No, it has not been acclaimed as the official channel of the United Nations, or the lingua franca of international legation. In fact, it is largely ignored by state institutions worldwide. Its only ticket to fame or notoriety is the fact that Donald Trump loves it. And because he does, this one man--the single most powerful individual on planet Earth--is able to command the attention of every person living in urbanized society with a cellphone in his or her hand. In 21st century terms that's everybody and his mother, father, sister, brother and cousin.

   No amount of persuasion will make Donald Trump give up this piped-in system of inflicting his random thoughts on people who love him, hate him and everyone else in between.   It is more than a bully pulpit. The Whitehouse is a bully pulpit. It is possible to be oblivious to it. But not to Twitter--it is every bit the essence of what is  being suggested in the movie Inception (Warner Brothers, 2010).

   If you wanted to obtain the greatest power on earth, what would it be?

   It would be the power to plant an idea in the mind of someone without that person becoming aware of the implantation.  It is the ability to control people's future behavior by injecting all the factors that would elicit that behavior someday, but without triggering any defensive or evasive response today. The only state in which an individual's mind could be penetrated without pushback is in the subconscious. Therefore, the venue for an operation to implant the seed of future conviction is in one's dreams, during one's sleep. In a nutshell, that is inception. It's also roughly the plot of the movie.

   It is conventional wisdom to say that Donald Trump is intellectually shallow. But i suspect that his mind is more devious than he is getting credit for. His random ramblings of thought might actually be a complex and deliberate political algorithm that informs his reputably predictable decisions. The mistake that his adversaries and victims--that might even include me--have all commonly made is to reckon his tweets using the metric of character, instead of intention. He makes comments that stretch credulity--but often it is enough to make you doubt what you do believe. He has used Twitter not only to cry "wolf!" but to sing a wolf song endlessly that you no longer care to wait for the real coming of the wolf. You just stop caring if it even comes at all. To too many, Donald Trump's tweets are just an indication of his insanity, never suspecting that they are the doors to their own vulnerability. They see his obsession with Twitter as a flaw of character, and not a deliberate pursuit of intention. In reality, it may be that Donald Trump is not really trying to impress anyone, or to prove himself dominant over everyone else--he just wants everyone to think he is absurdly harmless enough to let pass by. 

   Everytime Donald Trumps tweets another absurd recitation of falsehood and half-truths, it sends everybody scrambling to fact-check him. He has prescribed the relationship between himself and the rest of the world: he is the inceptor, everybody else are  the reactors. 

   That is why the phrase "standard issues of the day" has lost its meaning. The issues we discuss today, relevant or not, are the matters Donald Trump is fulminating about in his latest tweet. He directs the universal political dialogue towards the trivial and inconsequential by being trivial and inconsequential. The power of Twitter does not consist of the influence of Donald Trump. It partakes of how he has discovered, and now utterly exploits, the helplessness of his captive audience. 

   The traditional clarions of public opinion are stilll there, of course: the editorials and opinion columns of learned scholars, political scientists and close observers. But even they are renegades from academia. The forum of political discourse has long departed the proverbial agoras of Greek scholarship. Because of technology, nuggets of wisdom are now just a Google away, no longer the product of personal research, sometimes not even of personal understanding. The average person today gets his opinion from bumper stickers.  Who still has the time to read? When the level of political discourse is limited to 280 characters, truth and wisdom itself is truncated. With the great spotlight of education extinguished, it yields a society of the philosophically blind. And, sadly, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed rises to become King.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON