When I took my wife with some close friends to Taipei last weekend via Eva Air, we had to go through the Naia 1 terminal. Since I usually take Philippine Air Lines flights, I never realized how Jurassic Naia 1 had become by international standards.

Santa Banana, there?s no decent restaurant in sight inside the terminal building. If you want to take something, you have to climb up another floor and eat at a small dining place.

Having gone to many places in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, I can very well say that Naia 1 is an international embarrassment. My gulay, it can?t even pass as a terminal in some interior cities!

After paying P750 per person for Naia 1, I really wonder where Naia general manager Alfonso Cusi is putting all the money that can earn the airport hundreds of thousands of pesos daily, considering the fact that millions of travelers go through it a month. I felt cheated paying that fee just to go through a junkyard.

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The government has reportedly dropped a crucial pre-condition that it hopes will soften up the Moro Islamic Liberation Front to go back to the negotiating table.

And would you believe that the government will no longer impose as a pre-condition the arrest of three rouge MILF commanders that went on a looting, burning, raping and killing spree of innocents after the Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional the controversial Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain?

I don?t know if Malaca?ang realizes what this means. Will we be willing to forget the heinous deeds committed by these rogue commanders, Bravo, Kato and Pangalian?

Santa Banana, this is just as bad as that attempt of President Arroyo?s peace negotiators and advisers to grant the MILF its own homeland and jurisdiction in violation of the Constitution. Yes, we want peace. But not at all costs. Certainly not at the price of forgetting atrocities done to Filipinos!

My gulay, in effect, the MILF will be going back with bloody hands to the negotiating table after the secessionists refused to surrender their rogue commanders to the government. For this, can we ever trust them again?

It?s a weak government that submits to rebels and separatists in the name of peace. Santa Banana, it is a virtual surrender on the part of government!

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My two elder brothers?Court of Appeals Justice Desiderio P. Jurado and former MIA general manager Willie Jurado?would now be 91 years old and 88 years old, respectively, had they not died years ago.

I remember them since both were in the resistance movement against the Japanese during the occupation. Willie was a volunteer to Bataan, and survived both the Death March and the Capas concentration camp when he got sick of malaria and dysentery, and was almost buried alive. Desi was in Fort Santiago for seven months and after the amnesty. Willie and Desi joined the 121st USAFIP-NL Infantry Guerrilla movement under Col. Russel Volckman as lieutenants. Desi was an authentic hero of the Battle of Bessang Pass leading to the surrender of General Yamashita. And he had medals to prove it.

I recall all these whenever I see photos of decrepit and on the wheel-chair World War II veterans applying for their measly $9,000 dole by the American government. My gulay, one octogenarian veteran even died on a wheelchair on the line!

Thus, if Willie had lived up to this date, he would also be lining up for those benefits in wheelchairs. Desi refused to get paid for serving his country. That?s why I say God blessed Willie. He was spared from the ordeal which many war veterans had to go through to get that $9,000 dole, actually an insult to Filipino war veterans who fought for the Americans.

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The International Intellectual Property Alliance recently filed a report to the US government regarding the piracy situation in several countries. Based on this report, it recommended that the Philippines be returned to ?priority watchlist? status, a demoralizing downgrade from our current ?ordinary watchlist? status. If the facts and figures that the IIPA quoted are true, then the government agencies involved would need to re-evaluate their strategies and account for their seeming inefficiency.

Fortunately, it turns out that the proverbial egg is not in the face of IIPA Philippines director Che Cristobal or Optical Media Board chairman Edu Manzano. Instead, it is splattered across the face of the IIPA for distributing unsubstantiated and patently erroneous information.

As the saying goes, ?garbage in, garbage out.? Where in the world did the IIPA gather its data, in the first place, and from whom?

As I went through the report, there were portions where it appeared that the source or sources merely gazed at the clouds and made up figures. Santa Banana, according to the report, the country is a net exporter of pirated optical media goods!

Quick, take a look at your current collection of DVDs: Did you notice that most of them are labeled in Chinese and feature atrociously bad English? Where do you think these were made? If we were indeed a net exporter of pirated discs, that means that the local supply is ample enough to satisfy resident consumers, with enough to spare. That certainly doesn?t seem to be the case.

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It appears to me that the IIPA is stuck in a time warp. Based on the report, there are 13 replicating facilities operating in the country today, with the OMB allegedly licensing three more facilities during the last three years.

A quick check on the actual numbers indicates that there were indeed 13 replicating machines in the country way back in 2000. Fast forward nine years later, documented evidence shows that the figure is down to three. Even more bizarre is the fact that OMB never licensed three additional facilities, but instead closed down the same number, two of which are done in 2008 alone.

The IIPA likewise said that the Philippines is a hotbed for camcorder recording in cinemas. Granted, they have the figures to back up this accusation, I think the report became quite contentious when it portrayed our local IP enforcements agencies almost like fumbling idiots. In fact, when you watch movies as often as I do, viewers are warned against camcorders beside you.

I think our IP enforcement agencies deserve a round of applause and a pat on the back. The OMB, in particular, operates on a shoestring budget against a problem that is as multi-faceted as it is relentless with millions of dollars to boot. Compounding their woes is the complete absence of specific legislation on the unauthorized recording of movies and digital downloading over the Internet.

As if their job wasn?t already big enough (and conversely, their resources small enough), Manzano and his crew actually took the initiative and found ways and means to fit this within the jurisdiction of the OMB. The result of this decision to go above and beyond the call of duty resulted in more than 200 camcorder-related apprehensions in SM Malls alone.

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It is interesting to find out what happened to these 200 apprehensions. If the IIPA is to be believed, they probably got away scot-free because of our ?complete systemic failure of courts,? and the ?significant deficiencies in IPR enforcement? due to the ?failure of federal law enforcement to take significant action.? In truth, it is ironic that the likeliest culprit seems to be the local representative of the Motion Picture Association of America itself.

In the case of those 200 camcorders, it never reached our courts because the MPAA member film distributors did not bother to file any charge. Thus, my advice to IIPA is to double-check its facts before making sweeping statements to distinguished bodies like the US trade representative?s office.

Last year, the OMB seized P1.7 billion of counterfeit optical media and closed down two replicating facilities, as well as three warehouses. With this in mind, they should pick up a DVD copy?original, of course?of the movie 300 and realize that King Leonidas and his undermanned army of Spartans is exactly what the situation is like in the fight against optical piracy.