Bob Tacto's columns

The Crude Art of the Steal: What 'Kristine Applegate Estrada' Tells Us About the Philippines' Crisis The single most damaging piece of evidence against Vice President Sara Duterte isn't a secret bank ledger or a leaked wiretap. It’s a piece of paper with a fake name on it. Not just any fake name, but a name so absurd, so brazenly lazy, that it perfectly encapsulates the rot at the heart of the scandal: "Kristine Applegate Estrada." In the annals of political corruption, there have been sophisticated shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, complex layered transactions through Swiss banks, and encrypted communications. But the scandal currently unfolding in the Philippine Senate impeachment trial suggests a different, more contemptuous methodology. The strategy wasn't to hide the money in a maze of legal entities; it was to hide it in plain sight, behind a smokescreen of farce. The Office of the Vice President (OVP), under Duterte’s leader...

In June 2026, Cuba's National Assembly did something unthinkable just a decade ago: it passed 176 sweeping free-market reforms, dismantling pillars of the revolutionary economy that had stood since 1959. Private banks were authorized. Real estate development was permitted. Foreign investors were allowed to take equity stakes in state-owned enterprises. "Elements that for decades were listed as pillars of the revolutionary economy," one political scientist observed, "have been dismantled". Cuba didn't embrace these reforms out of ideological conviction. It did so because its state-run economy was gasping—crippled by 20-hour daily blackouts, fuel shortages, and a collapsing power grid. The Castro regime's decades-long experiment with state control and expropriation had produced not equality, but impoverishment. The lesson is as old as it is unforgiving: expropriation doesn't eliminate inequality—it just replaces one elite with another while destroying ...

THE COLLAPSE OF THE DUTERTE DYNASTY: A CASE STUDY IN THE FAILURE OF LAWLESSNESS The images are almost surreal in their symmetry. In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte stood triumphant before adoring crowds, promising to kill so many criminals that "the fish in Manila Bay will grow fat." A decade later, the same man sits in a detention cell at The Hague, awaiting trial for crimes against humanity while his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, fights for her political life through an impeachment trial that has laid bare the rot at the core of their family's political machine. The Duterte dynasty, built on a foundation of blood, fear, and manufactured heroism, is collapsing under the weight of its own brutality—and the world is watching. The fall of the Dutertes is not merely a political story. It is a masterclass in the inevitable arc of unchecked power, the catastrophic consequences of abandoning due process, and the haunting truth that societies which celebrate vigilante...

If you live in Wichita, Kansas, or Greenville, South Carolina, and you turn on a high-end television purchased in the last year, you might be greeted by a strange new logo: a stylized, circuit-like mark signifying "NextGen TV." The local news anchors in these markets don’t just promote their upcoming segments; they remind you to "rescan your TV" to "unlock the future of free broadcast television." But if you live in a high-rise in Manhattan or a hillside home in Los Angeles, the phrase "ATSC 3.0" means nothing. It is not a feature on your Roku home screen. It is not advertised on the billboards of Sunset Boulevard. It is a ghost technology—a massive infrastructure shift occurring in the flyover states while the coastal media capitals remain blissfully unaware, or actively hostile to the concept. We are witnessing a schism in the American media landscape, a fundamental clash of business models disguised as a technology debate. On one s...

The Density Illusion: How I Discovered Manila is the World's Most Crowded City I recently returned from a trip to Metro Manila, and I have a confession to make: I had no idea I had just visited the most densely populated metropolitan area on Earth. Like most people, I assumed the world's most crowded cities would be the ones with the biggest names—Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen. These are the megacities we read about, the ones that dominate headlines about urban expansion and population booms. It seems intuitive: the world's largest metro area (Tokyo) or its most populous country (China) must surely hold the density records. I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. The Tokyo Assumption My initial thinking was perfectly logical. The Greater Tokyo Area is home to roughly 37 to 40 million people—equivalent to the entire population of California or Canada crammed into a single urban expanse. That sounds impossibly crowded. When you hear that statistic, your mind conjur...

The Lost Civilization of the Modem: What the BBS Era Taught Us About the Internet We Lost There is a persistent, almost comforting myth in the tech world that progress is linear—that every new iteration of software is objectively better than the last, and that the digital ecosystems we inhabit today are the inevitable, polished evolution of a crude past. We look back at the Bulletin Board System (BBS) era of the 1980s and early 1990s with a kind of condescending nostalgia. We picture flickering green phosphorous screens, the screeching handshake of a 2400 baud modem, and clunky text-based menus. It is viewed as the digital equivalent of the Stone Age: fascinating, but primitive. But this framing is a dangerous fallacy. The BBS was not a rough draft of the internet; it was an entirely different philosophy of connectivity. It was a decentralized, human-curated, intimacy-driven network that, in many ways, offered a more authentic and healthy social contract than the hyper-scal...