For the nth time, make the ROTC compulsory!

For our special presentation on our talkshow Straight from the Sky, we are finally at the end of our Holy Land Pilgrimage Travelogue with the Delmar Travel & Tours. This time we have a one-on-one interview with our very interesting tour guide Mrs. Exie "Romema" Schlossberg. I wanted to do this special interview with Exie because we couldn't have done our seven previous travelogues to the Holy Land without her deep knowledge of Hebrew, Jewish history and the Bible.

What I found remarkable with Exie is that she is a Filipina woman who passed the most difficult tour guiding school in Israel, where you must first learn to read and write in Hebrew, then learn about Judaism and their history and since she's a Catholic who married a Messianic Jew (a Jew who accepts that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Messiah) she can give her tourists a most thorough lesson on the history of Israel. And because she is spirit-filled, she can also give lessons on Theology. She is also very well-known in Israel.

This is why our pilgrimage tour in Israel was akin to having a history lesson, a weeklong retreat and a marriage encounter rolled into one! So watch this very interesting interview with Exie at the Le Merdien David Dead Sea Resort Hotel on SkyCable's channel 61 at 8 p.m. and replays on Wednesday and Saturday at the same time slot with replays on MyTV channel 30 M-W-F.

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It's the resumption of school for the New Year 2014 and the big news that we are getting is that the big private universities and colleges, including the Big Four, the University of the Philip-pines, the Ateneo de Manila University, the University of Sto. To-mas and De La Salle University have come up with a proposal to the Commission on Higher Education that they would like to move the opening of school from the current month of June to as late as September.

If CHED agreed to this proposal, it would put the Philippines at par with our ASEAN neighbors, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, whose schools open in September. Of course we don't expect CHED to agree with these schools right away as they said that they need to study this proposal. Come now, this proposal has been dropped in the lap of CHED officials for many years now. Surely by now they must have already known the answers, whether we should make this move or not?

While we're on the subject of schools. While June is still six months away, allow me for the nth time to bat for the return of the Reserve Officers Training Corps back into our school curriculum and make it compulsory again. It's been years since the ROTC was made optional and look what has happened since. We have most of our youths wasting away fighting fraternity wars, when they should be taught about discipline and love of country. Yes, as I've mentioned so many times before, the ROTC program is the only subject in college that produces men that could be tapped in times of war or in peace as volunteers for relief operations during natural disasters.

Sure, there are people who insist that ROTC is still around. But since it is optional, our youth who need to know what discip-line is all about would rather not join the ROTC. If you didn't,  the ROTC program gets our youth trained to join the Armed Forces of the Philippines or the Philippine National Police. This is why we had better officers in the AFP in the 60's and 70's. I also know for a fact that when the ROTC was no longer compulsory in our schools, the Communist Party of the Philippines rejoiced because they know for a fact that if they raided a town and there are ROTC officers in the area, those people will shoot back at them.

So again, I exhort the Aquino Regime to bring back the ROTC to its former glory. If you remembered, most of the guerrillas during World War II came from the ranks of the ROTC. Because of them, the Japanese Army that occupied the Philippines had a rough time colonizing us. Yet those were days when there were very few guns around.

With a huge number of firearms in the hands of private indi-viduals, any nation thinking of invading the Philippines would have to think twice before they commit their troops to land on our shores. So let's bring back the ROTC and instill discipline in our youth so they can defend the motherland in times of war or help our citizenry during natural calamities.

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If there is anything new coming from the Civil Aviation Au-thority of the Philippines, it is that they have revised their ma-nuals to allow the use of cellphones or laptops while on board a commercial airliners. I have always known that in the past when-ever the flight is ready to takeoff, cellphones are not allowed to operate because it might interfere with the radio communications with the tower. I found this excuse a lot of  bull as cellphones have different radio frequencies from the radios that airplanes or towers use.

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