Bob Tacto's columns

On the morning of September 5, 2026, Vice President Sara Duterte walked into the Quezon City Regional Trial Court to post bail for three counts of grave threats. The charges were not abstract. They stemmed from her own televised words: a public admission that she had contracted an assassin to kill President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and then-House Speaker Martin Romualdez if she herself were killed. The court had found probable cause, issued a warrant, and set bail at ₱360,000. She paid it, and her lawyers secured an order lifting the warrant. By any legal measure, the system worked. But the scene outside the courtroom told a different story. Surrounded by a security detail estimated at 400 personnel—more than the protective force assigned to the sitting President—Duterte paused on the courthouse steps, pointed to the armed officers, and invoked a ghost. “Did you know Ninoy Aquino died on the stairs?” she asked her lawyer. “There are so many fire...

Every revolution promises to bury an old elite. Almost  none of them promise, out loud, to build a new one.  But that is what happened in Venezuela after 1999  and in Zimbabwe after 2000, and the pattern is clear  enough, and repeated enough, that it deserves a name more precise than "corruption" or "failed socialism." The sociologist Vilfredo Pareto had a term for it a  century ago: the circulation of elites. Not the abolition of a ruling class, but its replacement — one hierarchy swapped for another, with the human cost of the transition borne almost entirely by the people who were promised liberation from it. This is not an argument against redistribution as such, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Land reform has worked. Wealth taxes have funded functioning welfare states. The question this history actually raises is narrower and more useful: what determines whether a redistribution campaign produces a broader, more indep...

MANILA — The date September 4, 2026, will be recorded in Philippine history as a day of profound legal and political reckoning. When the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 98 issued an arrest warrant for Vice President Sara Duterte for grave threats, it tore through the veil of invincibility that has long shielded the nation’s most powerful political dynasty. Yet, to view this moment merely as a legal victory for the Marcos administration would be to misread the battlefield entirely. The warrant against the Vice President—arising from her televised admission that she had ordered a hitman to assassinate President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the First Lady, and former Speaker Martin Romualdez—presents a paradoxical reality. It is simultaneously a landmark achievement for the rule of law and a stark revelation of how dangerously fractured the institutions of the Philippine state have become. We are not witnessing a uniform application of justice. We are witnessing a bifurcated ...

My first and most profound philosophical error occurred before I was old enough to form a complete sentence. It didn’t happen in a university lecture hall, debating the nuances of David Hume’s problem of induction, nor in a sterile laboratory, analyzing statistical data for a confounding variable. No, my first grand failure of logic took place in the living room of my grandparents’ house, with a mouth full of fingers and the unshakeable, terrifying conviction that my teeth were supposed to come out. I was, by all accounts, a reasonably intelligent toddler. I had mastered the basics of object permanence, understood that a round block didn't fit in a square hole, and knew with absolute certainty that the furry, four-legged creature in my house was a "doggy." But on this particular day, my nascent intellect collided with a complex logical fallacy that would take decades for me to fully understand, and even longer to articulate: the profound di...

In the beginning, there was the word. In the American political vernacular, words do not merely describe reality; they construct it. They are weapons, shields, and territories. As we navigate the fractious landscape of the 2020s, two terms have risen above the fray to define the chasm between the American left and right: "woke" and "safe space." Once rooted in specific, often vulnerable, communities seeking survival and justice, these terms have been hijacked, stretched, and ultimately weaponized by the very forces they were originally designed to resist. We have witnessed a great semantic heist. "Woke" has been stolen from the lexicon of Black American struggle and repurposed as a catch-all slur for anyone who refuses to bow to the altar of MAGA. Simultaneously, the "safe space"—once a physical necessity for marginalized groups facing violence—has been re-engineered by the right into a justification for ideological isolation. This is...

In the summer of 1988, America was introduced to a bespectacled, slightly bewildered-looking boy who had just achieved what seemed impossible. Adragon De Mello, a mere 11 years old, walked across a stage at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to accept a degree in computational mathematics. The media, hungry for a narrative of superhuman intellect, swooped in. But the story they told wasn't just about an early graduation; it was a story embroidered with a fantastical, almost magical detail: the boy, they claimed, possessed an IQ of 400. The number was bandied about as fact. It was a clean, round, awe-inspiring figure that suggested a mind operating on a plane inaccessible to the rest of humanity. It appeared in headlines, in hushed television reports, and in countless debates about the nature of genius. The world was told it was looking at a child who was not just smart, but potentially the smartest person in the history of the species. There was only one problem: the number ...