THE CITIZEN ON MARS?

I Have A New Site!!!

2005-10-25T23:35:00.000+08:00

In my quest to bring better and better presentations to my readers, I have relocated this site to Blogsome. Please click here for the new site:>>> Where Now Is The Citizen On Mars?

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Snapping The Nation Again

2005-10-25T15:12:00.000+08:00

There is now once more, a call to sidestep the constitutional mode of transition by way of a snap election. It boggles me that we give back our trust so easily to something that had shown to be apparently flawed and fragile, that is, our election system. Isn't that the main thing why we want the President to step down? Remember, if somebody else win that snappy election, or if GMA herself would win again that out-of-the-blue contest, could we trust again any election results? I guess not. Not so soon. There would always be accusations of cheating again, and again and again and there would be tons of tons of "evidences" that would be linedup again in the halls of the Senate or the Supreme Court trying to declare who really won or who really got away with cheating. Remember also that we would wallowing once more in a muddy situation that we had such a bad experience with or a not-so-pleasant encounter with in the past. In 1986, the nation stood breathless before an unprecedented snap election, amidst massive boycotting and rampant violence and election fraud. And when the results came out, no one had believed it and then we drove the dictator out of office by the voices of the street, by the first ever and original People Power. it turned out rather well---having rid of an autocrat---but it was too messy.

Now whose to say that a snap election is good for us right now? And can we trust the COMELEC now to bring us the right election results?

The proposition is just to complicated if not too messy and outrightly laborious. It is basically so devoid of legal basis that we'd actually appear like some messy banana republic whose constitution is so worthless that it is being replaced so frequently just like replacing a mini-skirt.

I thought we were all gearing and desiring a parliamentary system of government, where federalism could give the people a whole lot of autonomy and self-determination with regards to their locality or provinces? Why not stick with the plan? Patience is a virtue, you know.

FVR Waddling In The Realm of Turncoatism

2005-10-21T14:12:00.000+08:00

Something unsavory must have happened within the ranks of LAKAS strong bedfellows that now, the elder of all elders of that seemingly formidable political cluster has made a major turnaround and finally spoke against Malacañang. Former President Fidel V. Ramos now completes all three living former Philippine presidents desiring the ouster of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo aside from former presidents Corazon C. Aquino and Joseph Estrada. I never even thought that this day would come knowing how FVR had unbelievably become a fierce defender of the Arroyo government lately---but the day finally did come. In fact if you ask me, this huge “about face” of FVR seem to leave a bad taste in the mouth, even among anti-GMA factions and may just stain his reputation as a elder politician loyal to his political aggrupation, now that he dwells almost in the realm of turncoatism. Maybe, he'd hide behind the famous Manuel L. Quezon line: "My loyalty to my party ends where my loyalty to my country begins".

What could have happened amongst them? FVR’s back-tracking may be a spinal blow to President Arroyo now that the Makati Business Club had recently emphasized its continued disavowal to her staying in office, while the street marches these days become more and more boisterous and virulent, like the hundreds of farmers from out-of-town braving the elements just to walk miles and miles of rugged streets in order to bash the President (wherever could you find a fiercer determination than that?). Now it seems, everyone is going against the tide, like the ever-pronounced Church people. Seemingly, GMA has no one left to rest her shoulders on. If she survives until 2007, this might be a minor political miracle.

It must have been ambition that destroyed a once formidable political bond between GMA and FVR, a union almost like that of a father to his daughter. When GMA recently declared in front of a congregation of businessman that “the Philippines will get rich in 20 years”, FVR might have seen this as hint to another broken GMA promise---she might not be willing to give way to a parliamentary government come 2007 after all and may even perpetuate herself until 20 years from now (remember, she once broke a promise not to seek another term). You see, in a parliamentary system FVR could once more maneuver a major comeback as the country’s Head of State, like he always had wanted to. Now we see that Speaker Joe de Venecia---a strong FVR ally---is suddenly clamoring for an immediate convening of a constituent assembly, in order to change our system of government.

What we see here is an actual proof that in politics there are no permanent friends, only permanent enemies, or something to that effect.

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"The Fog"

2005-10-17T16:04:00.000+08:00

I NEVER REALLY KNEW WHY BUT when I was of tender age (like about eight or nine years old) I had always found myself watching horror movies---not by intention but by pure chance. Every now and then, I would be glued to some fearsome flick that an older cousin or an uncle was watching on TV. Of course I had no control of what to watch on the boob tube when I was just a skinny kid back then and I can't really remember if we had a VCR at that time but always it had seem, I had been watching a lot of those scary films when I was little. In fact, there was once this occasion where Uncle Mameng was watching a late night film on TV just by himself and for some reason I arose from my bed so late in the evening and went downstairs and sat beside him as we both watched the film adaptation of Stephen King's “Salem's Lot”. How could I forget that film? There was this one scene when a ghost-child was floating on the night wind trying to open the window of the house being haunted. The ghost was repeatedly saying “Open the window!” and I just got scared by that particular portion of the movie that I cried furiously and so suddenly that Uncle Mameng had to calm me down and make me go upstairs. He said that I shouldn't be watching horror movies again. But then, I still had to watch a lot of them.

And then I remember watching this movie titled “The Fog” from a nearby theater back then. I went alone in the early afternoon while the sun was blazing in the sky. The chairs inside the theater were all empty except for some few souls. I had wondered then that maybe I had just wasted my money on a not-so-palatable movie. But “The Fog” was one movie that I could not easily forget for it had seem to have a hypnotic spell on me that even to this day, I still retain stark images of the film I had seen so many, many years ago. The plot wasn't that original----about some zombie-like creatures using the cover of fogs in order to haunt a town that had been at some point, responsible for their damnation. But inspite of that, I bet it was so well-made that the ghost story was so compelling and powerful. This shouldn't be a surprise to me now knowing just recently that it was directed by the legendary John Carpenter himself.

Now, Sony Pictures brings back to the big screen that unforgettable horror film in a remake. “The Fog” topped the box office in America this week and this may be a sign, that perhaps it wasn't only me that got so frightened by the 1980's film; that a whole generation is now trooping back to the theater to relive once more the horror of mangled hands coming out of fogs. Maybe you'll want to watch it too...

What Is A Crisis Condition?

2005-10-13T15:40:00.000+08:00

WE SHOULD ALL BE feeling appalled and dismayed by now, but strangely enough, we do not seem to belch anything close to a whimper when there should already be an outcry. Like we--the public--just do not mind it at all or perhaps just could not absorb the whole implication of such happenstance. I am talking about the proverbial emergency power that Malacañang might let loose on us if (according to Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita) the situations warrant it. T oday, the talk on the emergency rule already centers on the three main crisis condition s that could probably justify the declaration of the power and as declared, they are a terrorist attack, a breakdown in peace and order, and a steep surge in oil prices. It was only days ago that the head of the monster was just being whispered as rumors and gossip matters but now, we are almost speaking of the emergency rule as if it is already a requisite event that could always happen in the days to come with reasonable certainty. How much steeper can the oil prices go before it's a crisis condition ? How grave a terrorist attack be? And what breakdown of peace are they talking about? The conditions set by Malacañang are way too general that the gray areas are staring at us like a slimy serpent. And this becomes dangerous for us; when abuse of power become so very convenient for those who are poised to abuse.

What we are talking here are not simple emergency powers that have been exercised before. This is not merely about permitted importations of knock-down vehicles or power contract exemptions; the powers being contemplated by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is of such weight that could border on autocracy, taking over private companies and enterprises such as oil companies and public utilities in the aim of settling a “crisis condition”. It amazes me that US-educated economist like our President could speak of such overserious economic matter with mind-boggling casualness as if she is oblivious how such condition may possibly bring more harm than good to our country, like when massive capital takes flight out of our country like it was in the early 80's when then Prime Minister Cesar Virata made that famous television pronouncement “Mr. President, our country is in crisis!”. Not only that, the global economic community would surely frown on a nation that had gone to such dolorous extent as towards a Communist-style tactic of taking over major private undertakings like oil companies by way of executive compulsion. For certain, I do not have such adoration towards foreign capitals and capitalists but at this moment, massive capital plight out of our financial markets would surely result to dire economic consequences to our country. There'd be massive job lay-outs and capital reduction as industrial activity would slacken so sharply. National productivity would surely suffer and our credit standings would for certain reach record lows, even while we are already so low in the eyes of international funders and creditors.

Alright, granting that there'd really be a point that it would be so salacious and tempting to kick some ass and take over those profit-hungry oil companies but in my mind, these high-handedness should not be resorted to except when they become extremely necessary.

General conditions given by Malacañang as to what could be “a crisis condition” that should justify such weighty emergency powers are simply way too lenient and shouldn't be used as the guidelines for the eventual imposition. There should be mayhem in the streets before they'd dare take such measures. Or something like that.

As in the famous adage, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Pity The Nation

2005-10-10T14:47:00.000+08:00

“Hold me now, oh hold me now. Till this hour has come around. We fought for justice and not for gain but the magistrate sent me away.” --- The Edge singing for U2 in Van Diemen’s Land

WHEN TOMORROW COMES TO THIS NATION of our birth, what door should open to us and what road shall lead us unto what place?

To be certain, we take some little strides forward, and we have gained them, as our exports grow and the remittances of our overseas workers (our modern day heroes) redound into more and more families that are uplifted from the cruel stranglehold of poverty. Yet, as we examine our terrain, our society’s flawed pyramid of wealth, there are still much left to be desired. Like upon a battle, when the smoke clears after the last gunshot is heard and we see the dead and the maimed lying on the bloodied warpath, we know by heart that battles may be won now but the war ain’t over yet.

We must seek our future now for if tomorrow comes, we have no regrets to drink to and have no blame to impute upon ourselves.

Now we seek the key or keys to our forward march into the economic battles of this global economic world where competition is the harshest ever and those who flinch for even for just a second would surely lose any economic advantage where even the richest of nations now are more inclined to protect their markets with inequitable tariff adjustments that favors the few that caters to their own interests. The GATT is never fool-proof in fact, even as we speak, many have already seen blatant loopholes in the agreed rules and conduct of trade that markets like ours could not compete with subsidies other rich governments give their own farmers. There were times in the near past that it was much cheaper to import vegetables from South Korea than source them from local producers. And we are just talking about vegetables here. Fair play is an illusion and we only must realize this. We see even the European states gathering into a strong union in order to build and rebuild their markets and keep other competitions out of the way. To compete then is never to depend so much on equitable tariff adjustments from more advanced states but should be mainly on terms of quality and standard.

The great Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran once wrote: “Pity the nation that does not sew its own garments and pity the nation that does not make its own bread”.

The name of the game is self-sufficiency and resilience in trade. When we produce our own grains, then we do not have to bleed ever-scarce foreign currencies just to feed our people with bread. If we build our own cars, then we do not have to worry about being in the losing end of the economic game where we sell them commodities like rattan furniture and then on the other hand we buy from them high-end products like aircrafts. We gain a little and then lose heavily by gigantic profit margins. This is the apparent cause of the vicious cycle that we are in and that is why we continue to depend on foreign loans and aid to fulfill our budgetary requirements for the vicious cycle clearly indicates the symptoms of a bleeding nation and nobody seem to see the emergency situation.

There is no nation that rises without sewing its own garments. There are few exceptions primary of which are small countries like Singapore and Switzerland. Singapore rose steadily in the 1970’s by being the hub of British middlemen buying and selling anything from oil to silk and transporting them from one place to another—mainly to and from China mainland, which even in the past was already a very huge market. Of course, we know that Switzerland earns its wealth mainly by safekeeping other nation’s wealth and nothing much else. The Philippines could not become Singapore in a sense that the littlest of population of Singapore made it easier to distribute wealth into everyone’s pocket. We are a nation of tens of millions that we could not do business by simply becoming middlemen for other nation’s goods, to sell into somebody else’s market. In short, foreign investment may help small nations like Singapore but a huge nation like the Philippines, we need more effort than just taking in foreign investments. We need to look inward and see if we can create more wealth and become self-sufficient. When we sew our own garments, we can keep more hard currencies by not having to buy garments elsewhere.

When we can produce everything that we need then we will have lesser needs from outside entities and we do not need to bleed the nation for things we haven’t got. Productivity is the key to our nation’s success and self-sufficiency is our main objective.

Our engineers should have more buildings built. The lawyers more cases prosecuted and defended and judges should have more cases decided. Our farmers should reap more harvest and our fishermen should catch more fish from the seas. The writer should write more enchanting narrations and our poets should sing more wordy lullabies that endear the heart of readers. Our teachers should educate more children and our doctors cure more of those who are sick and pained. The carpenters must hammer more nails into more wood and cement while our taxi drivers should carry more passengers from one place to another. Our sellers then should sell more and our buyers would certainly buy more and more. And then when our laborers produces more sardines and electronic products, then they can have more in their pockets as the wages of their blood, sweat and tears rises also. And more money in the pocket of our laborers, the more they buy cigarettes and beer and milk and garments and the rich capitalists would surely have more business in mind. This is the cycle of our dreams, not a vicious one that holds us down like a leech, but one that will supplements us and complement every member of our society, and one day we could become a nation where no one is left behind, where everyone shall have a share in the pie and everyone moves ahead and not only the chosen and lucky few.

Many amongst us, the daily economists whispering into the ears of our leaders may at many times look outward towards the multinationals and the foreign investors with money to spare. But perhaps, we may miss the more important aspect of real economic progress where we only have to develop a self-generating system of economy by looking inward just one more time. We should give it one last try.

Killer Storms of The Future

2005-10-07T16:08:00.000+08:00

HYPERCANE is a new word I have learned after reading a disturbing note in the Periscope section of NEWSWEEK Magazine (October 3, 2005). The article takes issue if there would be more deadly hurricanes in the future like Katrina, the killer superstorm that had mercilessly devastated an entire American city, and left a whole nation in virtual shock.

What are hypercanes? Hypercane is a kind of hurricane that is at least thrice the strength of Katrina and would be deadly like upon a nuclear bomb, where anything on its path---all structures and life-forms---would be banished in seconds. The term was first coined by MIT Professor Kerry Emmanuel when he put into motion a computer model of a super-hurricane, one that could result from extreme temperatures in the ocean, about 80 degrees to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Obviously, the present times have not experienced a storm anywhere near the strength of a hypercane but scientific studies have reasonably showed that giant storms have frequently disturbed the Earth's surfaces in the ancient times, and may even have contributed to the complete extinction of the dinosaurs. MIT's Emmanuel has strongly theorized that frequent and huge meteorite impacts in the very far past had caused the rising of the ocean's temperature and thus, giving birth to giant and so very ferocious hypercanes, affecting and wiping-out the dinosaurs roaming inland as well as their habitats.

If Emmanuel's theory is credible enough then we have another huge reason to counter and stave off the onset of global warming. It turns out that rise in the oceans' temperature would not only lead to the elevation of sea level (putting in danger many of the world's seaside cities) but could also create sinistrous weather condition that may result to deadly storms like Katrina. Maybe it's time that heavily industrialized countries like America and Australia sign the Kyoto Pact against global warming. Maybe, the warning signs have been too loud for for us to ignore.

A Bad Means To An Unfavorable End

2005-10-04T14:13:00.000+08:00

THE CONGRESSMAN FROM PARAÑAQUE Roilo Golez referred to the reported assassination plot against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as a "fantastic tale" and I can't really blame him for that. Killing a bird is one thing but "taking away" a president's life is another. We know how murder plots are usually cooked, they are almost always being done thru whispers and moans, where the windows are shut tight and the door locked hard so that no one could intrude knowingly or unknowingly and hear outrightly about some sullen secrets in the hearts and minds of some men.

How in the world a Senate President and a former Head of State had once became so careless, throwing every caution into the wind, and letting know of some insipid plan to another Senator is quite amazing to me, if it would turn out to be true. I guess even Tom Clancy or John Grisham would not invent such kind of plot in their own fictions for it would be too clumsy and convenient, to the point of embarrassment. The purveyors of this somewhat "fantastic" allegation could have been more original if say, a lowlier military officer would have opened the pandora's box, but to see that it was Senator Miriam Santiago herself overhearing a murder plot being hatched supposedly by a colleague in the Senate is quite unbearable. Or maybe Senator Santiago had an asset and that might just be feasible. Who knows?

Now despite the strangeness or surrealism of this whole assassination plot mess, we could say that in the logic of things and in the matter of statistical possibility, there is still that fair chance that indeed Senator Franklin Drilon and former President Corazon Aquino had suddenly became so maliciously evil that they had decided to "take away" President Arroyo's breath. Now what comes to our mind by then? Would the means justify the end?

I think the means would in no way reach its justification for it would be such a stupid thing to do. The present opposition had so much goodwill among their folds, being seen as the beacon of truth, as against a "lying" president, and it would be so inimical to their interest to ever contradict sanity and kill like killing is but a simple thing to do. In the event of an assassination attempt, failed or successful, the tides of sympathy may just blow over into the Malacañang's side and leave the opposition bloc out in the cold. Furthermore, a military takeover in that scenario may just be seen by many in our country, as well as by other nations, as too hostile for comfort and too uncivilized that in the end, the worse has just become worst beyond estimation, like something hitting the fan. This is what this country needs the least at this point, it is clearly a bad means towards an unfavorable end.

Every assassin is of the same kind of malice, irregardless of the quality of his intention.

I WOULD LIKE to greet all of my Triskelion fraternal brods today as we commemorate the TAU GAMMA PHI 37th founding anniversary. I have been in the brotherhood for almost fifteen years now and it had been such a wonderful experience to be part of one of the oldest fraternity in the country. Though I am mostly inactive now, still I enjoin in this momentous event in my own personal way.

THIS IS THE FIRST DAY OF RAMADDAN, the period of fasting for all moslems. I send my felicity towards the Islam world in this holy month, as they aim for the fullness of faith through self-sacrifice and denial.

Who or What Created Man?

2005-09-28T15:22:00.000+08:00

This is happening in America right now, as only such things can. In a Pennsylvania township called Dover, the district school board there just decided that Charles Darwin's theory on evolution is ultimately flawed and that it contained gaps as huge as the water we see in the ocean. And so, they decided to teach the students enrolled in their school system the idea that man existed due to no other causes but by the intelligent hands of God, and that existence on earth is so complex that there could only be a God behind it. This alternative theory to evolution is termed as "intelligent-design" concept and known some other times as "creationism", a philosophy on man's existence that is well-attuned to the story of creation as told in the Bible.

Now, the parents of 11 students from Dover School District have starkly protested this compulsory inculcation of the "intelligent-design" concept of man's existence and insisted that the usual scientific philosophy of evolution as theorized by Charles Darwin should remain in the curriculum of the said school and not any concept that is so devoid of scientific and empirical evidence. The parents also complained that teaching the "intelligent-design" concept would merely undermine the notion that science should be trusted completely, and should be believed as it should be. They say that bringing down science will only be bad for the kids.

It would be quite interesting to find out how this U.S. landmark trial will turn out in the end. Is man created by God or did it existed through millions of years of evolution? This is not the primary question that the U.S. Supreme Court will haveto decide upon but for certain, it would be so swell to see how the American justices will comment on it.
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Symbols of Democracy

2005-09-26T16:38:00.000+08:00

Our government, or the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to be more specific, is now beginning to act like a huge cynic further losing its composure. As if it believes that the sky is already falling down, and then it goes on a panic streak---yelling and hollering "the sky is falling!" If this is not pushing the panic button, then I do not know what it is.

Malacañang has recently announced that "maximum tolerance" won’t be applied anymore to any street marcher that does not boast of any rally permit and instead the police would take on “calibrated preemptive response(s)" as a manner of engaging permitless dissenters who troop into the streets, highways, parks and avenues of Metro Manila. This reminds me by the way of the term "preemptive response", a wartime idiom invented by Australian PM John Howard amidst the rising global terrorism crisis, to which every human rights activists in the world howled with steep protestations where such policing mode allows arrest and detention of suspected terrorist even with doubtful and hazy probable causes---thereby imbibing possible warrantless arrests.

Just yesterday, Metro Manila Police Chief Vidal Querol had proclaimed in no uncertain manner and in with almost violent emphasis that from now on, street protesters have "to respect the law" and that "Dura lex sed lex (the law may be harsh, but it is the law)". Meaning to say, police authorities would not just stare at a distance when the protesters begin howling in the streets of Manila, instead they would have to take them in, and take them in hard. Because of this, there could just be a rise in the number of arrests of street militants starting from now, and knowing how Manila activists are adamant as hell, there could be a Marcosian scale of street arrests once more, as if the dreaded members of the now defunct Philippine Constrabulary have resurrected from the dead in order to scour the eskinitas and slums of Manila for suspected activists. This is a fearful image in my mind that I am not surprised now if the national anxiety for a return to martial rule is at an all-time high.

To be sure, the constitutionally protected right to peaceful assembly (like political rallies, religious parades, labor protests, etc.) is one liberty that is held dearest by the Filipino people, and one mode of public act that has certainly helped shaped our history through the years, and what we have now become. From the moment those valiant Katipuneros tore angrily their cedulas as a manner of civil disobedience against the tyrannical Spanish conquistadors in the days so old to recollect to the boisterous street singing in Mendiola under Martial hands of Marcos, public assembly had always shown its benefits to us even while admitting that at times, they are just inconvenient and injurious to public peace and order.

In our legal jurisprudence, the freedom of assembly is a constitutionally guaranteed freedom although it is not a freedom absolute (just like any other freedom mentioned in the Bill of Rights). Juridical precedence lays out clearly how this freedom may be limited under a number of tests foremost among are the “Clear and Present Danger Rule” and “The Balancing of Interest Test”. In the clear-and-present-danger rule, any public congregation of people may not be permitted or be impeded immediately if such assembly actually harms the peace of the land. Not only ordinary and common peace we know in the streets but the assembly must be violent enough or seditious enough so as to bring disruption and danger to national peace, to the extent of directly endangering the present status quo or the government. If the assembly is far from directly harming national peace and order, it shall pass the clear and present danger rule and may not be prevented by any means. The key word here is “direct”.

In the balancing-of-interest test, the authorities go on weighing the effect of a particular public assembly, whether or not it harms directly our national interest. This is a much simpler test than the one mentioned above where it is only to be determined if actually, and not by just mere speculation and estimate, that such and such rally poses grave danger to the status quo.

Among other conditions, rallies are permitted in so long as the congregation of people shall not impede or halt public functions or duties, or obstruct the natural flow of people and vehicles. If street protesters fulfill the conditions set in our laws and legal precedence, and pass legal tests for legality and propriety of public assemblies, then “maximum tolerance” must still be applied to them by the police authorities. The marches must go on. The rallies must remain. They are sacred symbols of democracy.

Let us not forget that if not for the angry marches of the people in 1986, we would have not toppled completely a ruinous dictator and there would have been no EDSA Revolution to speak of, or People Power to breathe out into the ears of our young at present.

Without marches and rallies, the scandal-prone administration of Joseph Estrada would have brought us down completely towards economic hell and President Arroyo would not have been in office right now in the first place. She should know that and at least she would be grateful for that.

And yet now, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has made known without any pretense how she had become so allergic to street protests that she had virtually ordered a Marcosian-like attitude towards militants with the so-called “calibrated preemptive response” I wonder how calibrated the response would be. The President must have not realized this, by declaring an all-out war against street militants, she had just showed her great inclination towards autocracy and the people might just one day believe that she could really have the temerity to waddle into martial rule. The signs and symptoms are present and if the people would finally believe that she could really do such crazy thing, that’ll be the day that she might just regret completely.

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Tuba

2005-09-24T15:08:00.000+08:00

Over gallons and gallons of tuba ---the quintessentially popular Filipino beverage made out of palm or coconut trees--- I once in a while congregate with some friends from the neighborhood. I am not really so inclined to wallow on the native wine but lately, I had the keenest desire to socialize with the people I know just across the street and thus, I had grown fonder and fonder of the bittersweet taste of tuba every time I went out and join the men from the neighborhood. I wasn't as outgoing as I am now before where I usually stay indoor even during the weekends, reading piles of magazines and newspapers with the television always blaring in the living room. But once about six months ago, a familiar face from our vicinity invited me to a birthday celebration and there were just a lot of drinking that day and then I tasted tuba as the tip of my tongue felt the rich saccharine quality of the beverage that went with a touch of savory bitterness at the end. Not that it was the first time that I have tasted the native drink. When I was in college, I clearly remember one sojourn into the mountainside just outside the city limits and during a stopover to a very small but neat sari-sari store, we were offered to buy a gallon of fresh tuba just newly taken out of the palms of the coconut tree just standing by that store. One of my companions were very adventurous that day and so we sat down to finish about two gallons of tuba. The first time I tasted it, I thought it was so smooth to the taste and so cool as it enters the mouth. There was one problem for me though about the drink---the smell is a little bit overpowering especially when you already have more than what you should be drinking.

But now, I can easily ignore the stench. Perhaps, one can get used to it through some time and become oblivious to the smell completely. One of my friend from the neighborhood once declaimed that tuba is the grape wine of the Philippines, that by drinking it, we somehow recollect a part of the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, where in the past He had often convened with His disciples through bottles and bottles of grape wine. I responded quite positively to this very keen observation from a friend and I said that maybe, if Our Lord Christ were born in our country, He would have enjoyed the exotic taste of tuba.

Tuba is actually constituted by fermenting the sap extracted from the palm leaves of coconut trees. It is the beverage of choice among the people from the lowlands as well as the hinterlands---the farmers, the fishermen, the laborers and even the tricycle drivers. You could say it is the condiment that soothes the ailing bodice of the masses, the magical wine that inspires the laborer to labor for more and the rural lover to serenade more ardently and sing more ballads, with gusto, while the moon is so full at twilight time.

Through this magical wine, I have known many new friends that speak to me and relate to me like they have known me for a thousand years. We converse at times of some vacuous things in life, some foolishness of youth, about some fleeting things like love and lovers, even of such frivolous things as the number of stars in the sky, and we became gleeful somehow of these fleeting things and our laughters resonate through the windy atmosphere of our neighborhood. But sometime, we talk of the more salient part of life, like the families we are responsible for, the children we rear and educate as well as the harshness of the economy and the stinging effect of rising prices to our shallow pockets.

Lustre Street, if you could only observed more closely, is a cornucopia of everyday reality. Some part of the neighborhood consist of the better-positioned in life with their houses newly-painted while they parade their classy automobiles as they pass by us. In the larger portion of the community dwells the more humble inhabitants and even the poorer ones, as small wooden houses outnumber the large ones by a ratio of fifty to one. Most of my friends are carpenters and masons while others drive the pedicab and some sell fish in the market. And then there are some of them who take their daily bread by carrying sacks and sacks of copra over their very young bodies, day-in and day-out. I have learned that a laborer in the port area earns only about fifty pesos after carrying sacks and sacks of load for almost a day. I find these situation so sad and regrettable. I wonder if the fifty pesos would suffice to answer the cost of food on the table, the fare to workplaces and for the education of their children. I guess, not. I guess they could not do anything but accept the lack of so many things in life. And I guess, with tuba on hand, they often cure the tiredness of their swollen muscles and empty stomachs through gallons and gallons of it, as if the native drink is the narcotic that relieves all the pains of poverty.

And then there are those who just do not have any form of permanent livelihood, who merely stands by the street while waiting for some opportunity for work. They often ask if somebody needed to have the grasses cut in their lawns or if they needed repairs on their toilets. They are often still so young to carry copra at the port area or whose frailty in physique is not as virile fit for a port laborer.

Even those friends I have who are accomplished carpenters and masons, they often complain that many times, work is harder to find. A group of them---Nonoy, Dan and Erwin---had just finished six-month worth of construction work on a plea market but now, they have gone for almost two weeks without work, and of course without any income for their households. Nyor Tony and another Dan on the one hand are still waiting for a certain Peter to arrive from out-of-town in order for their work on a bungalow within the neighborhood to resume. They too had not worked for many weeks. Toti and Paco have been contracted for some painting jobs just once a week and so they still have a problem where to source their daily bread during the rest of the week. Dodong was luckier. He had found employment in a government project in Barangay Ayala and pay is more than average.

Often, the people I know in the neighborhood paints the whole picture of hardship and constant struggle by the Filipino people at present where even those who are willing to work upon harsh conditions still could not find work. Even for carpenters and masons, the opportunity to find the means of livelihood is still very difficult, like threading the very small eye of a needle. Where in the world our country had gone too? To the dogs? There is a sort of panic in my mind thinking how many of our fellow countrymen have long endured the harshness of poverty and lack of opportunity. If only our senators and congressmen, jueteng lords, tycoons, hardware owners, the cabinet members, the President herself, the big business people, the bankers, the mayors and the governors, the political strategists, the U.S. envoys, the ambassadors, the mall owners, the manufacturers and the lot could even just for one day see for themselves first hand, upon close inspection and somehow experience the difficulties many of our countrymen suffers everyday, every time the sun rises from the east and settles in the west, then perhaps they would stop all their follies, all their bickering like who has the bigger pork barrel and who has lesser. If they could only fully comprehend the extent of our people's suffering, then maybe they'd all become less greedy and not full of self-interest as they are right now, as suddenly they would be patriotic and altruistic enough to help alleviate the plight of the poor amongst us, not next year or next month, but now, this moment, ahora mismo!

And so with my carpenter friends who sometimes have work and most of the time logging around and walking about because work is not at hand, I just said to them once that I wish there would be more buildings to be constructed, more houses to be built, more roads to be paved, more walls to be painted, more sand and gravel to be melded and more cement to be poured. By then, they can have work almost all the time.

...

A Comical Turn

2005-09-21T15:27:00.000+08:00

Now the espionage drama, or the to put in another sense, the U.S. knee-deep involvement into our political affairs has now somewhat took a comical turn. Now the U.S. authorities actually has in their dossiers the result of a background investigation on the person of Vice President Noli de Castro. When alledegly asked by a U.S. agent about the trade imbalance between the Philippines and the U.S., he reportedly answered: "We're your Number One ally, and our President is your Number One fan [yet other countries seem to be] getting more." This "unlikely" response by de Castro apparently led the U.S. Embassy in Manila to declare him as highly inept in matters of foreign policy, and probably in all other aspects of governance.

With an oversimplistic answer like that, you could say that we could not really blame the U.S. authorities for giving a thumbs-down to a de Castro leadership in the event of a resignation or overthrow of the GMA administration but I think, something in all this make it highly unfair to the person of our Vice-President, where this report might just shoot down his chances on the presidency (while he already seem to have a lock on it by next presidential election; being ever more popular than any other political figure we know nowadays).

One interview does not make a man. We do not know him that much while we know him casually as a highly personable person with an ultra-high television charisma. VP Noli de Castro may not claim as his strongest point matters on foreign policy but who knows, he might just be the best "dometic policy" president that we might ever have. Remember, history does not as much remember a good leader for his relations with other countries but so much of what a good leader has done to his fellowmen (Like Manuel L. Quezon and Ramon Magsaysay). It is of rare occassion where a statesman is mostly remembered for his views on foreign policy (Like Margareth Thatcher and Richard Nixon). Good leaders are often revered for the deeds that they have done to their nation.

Intelligence is certainly a must for anyone desiring to becoming the next leader of our nation but I believe, it is the genuine interest to help alleviate the suffering of the people that should be prime among all motives. They say a good intention is not enough, but at least it must not be absent at all.

Why Spy?

2005-09-19T11:08:00.000+08:00

Apparently, what could be the subject of espionage by Michael Ray Aquino are two reports by a U.S. envoy on the possibility or viability of coup attempts that were being planned against the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, one in the early part of this year and another just about a couple of months before the impeachment controversy had reach it climactic heights. The reports were allegedly prepared by US Charge d'Affaires Joseph Mussomeli in assessment of a palpable wrangling within the Armed Forces of The Philippines, among “a substantial number" of junior officers and generals. Such reports went on in concluding that any coup attempt would be premature for primarily lacking in public support. Of course, it could not entirely be confirmed if those reports were actually the subject of documents that former PNP Senior Superintendent Michael Ray Aquino had “sourced” from FBI files in America.

To think, what could be other reasons or motives why FBI had to have some sensitive files concerning the Philippines. There were initial queries about what could exactly be the content of the so-called FBI files and what could probably be so important about our nation that American authorities had to have certain classified information about it. It makes me wonder. Not like we have some secret nuclear weapon program or a stealthy plan to invade a neighboring country, like in the case of Iran or Iraq. I do not think also that we hide some Weapons of Mass Destruction concealed somewhere beneath our Philippine soil.

And so the FBI files must contain none other subject than that “research” or “assessment” by the U.S. Embassy on the possibility of coup plots being launched against the GMA administration. If you asked me, any person worth his while would not have to extract any FBI information storage just to know that some uprising is being cooked within the military organization, with the confluence of the opposition politicians. These things are always up in the air and we always can smell it like dirty fumes from a decrepit factory nearby. Mostly, we do not have to be a super-secret agent in order to know these things?

And so what I mean, Michael Ray Aquino may have just unduly harmed himself by improperly acquiring information that he would have gotten just easily using internal sources, without violating any U.S. laws. I suspect that he was just given the Elliot Ness treatment, being caught red-handed with an innocuous wrongdoing, when he could not be prosecuted successfully with a more serious one. Let us remember that he had fled the Philippines years ago in order to escape murder charges leveled against him in connection with the murder of publicist Bubby Dacer and his driver in 2000. If he can’t be taken out by the murder indictment, he will fall by this espionage infringement.

All the while, although it won’t surprise us anymore why the U.S. Embassy would tinker its hands into our political affairs (where it seems to me that they have to dip their hands into every nation’s affairs), it still amazes me how they could sum up so very detailed information contained in the two reports by Mussomeli, generally pointing out to a certain group of “young officers and generals” as the progenitor of the planned coup attempts, like they knew their names with certainty, and just wouldn’t admit to it for evident reasons. Could the U.S. Embassy been in contact with these military people? Is Mussomeli been involved in this more than what is necessary? This present controversy on spying tells us something about the extent of meddling the U.S. had on our affairs; that perhaps, the U.S. government is trying to wield its influence over our politics more than what is necessary and more than what we ever had thought before.

...

MIG AYESA: Almost A Rockstar

2005-09-15T14:46:00.000+08:00

MIG AYESA is finally aboard the ROCKSTAR.INXS finale which will be staged on Wednesday next week. Asked if how he had grown in the past weeks,he said without blinking that he is just all too happy to be part of the show. Now, that's humility unparalleled. No wonder he is of Filipino lineage.

This sort of "good guy image" has certainly earned Migs a lot of votes across the Pacific basin but an INXS member (it must have been Gary Beers) had cautioned him that this overly sweet persona may do him more harm than good. He was told that he needs to have some kind of a "dark side" because as seen popularly, rockers are a little bit mean--meaning Migs must have some sort of an "attitude".

And so Mig was made to sing Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black", perhaps to check out if he has that "darker self". If you asked me, the song may have the word "black" on it but it's still difficult to hide his true self, where we all still know that he is such a nice guy. Could INXS take an overly nice guy as Michael Hutchence's replacement in the band? Well, why not? As what Mig had said, the audience vote (he was never in the bottom three except this week) proves something-- that he should be in the band.

And now there are only three surviving rockers going into next week's finale---Marty, J.D. and of course the ever popular Mig Ayesa. having heard how these three men howled and crooned on the stage, it would be all too difficult to make predictions. They all have performed so extraordinarily well lately that according to Kirk Pengily "it seems unfair for us to make a decision".

Of course my heart goes to Mig being our kababayan. If he were not rooted here, I might have seen him more of a pop star and not as a rocker although his vocal range is wide enough that he can resurrect any INXS song with ultimate ease. But as the INXS members noted in the interviews, he lacks that "rocker attitude". Not that he has an attitude problem but what they could possibly mean is that, a proper rocker must have some sort of an "attitude", a darker side, whatever that means. But Migs is surely popular with the girls and if he ever wins this contest, he could guarantee good sales for any future INXS record.

Now Marty seems to be most talented among the three and he had proven this when he sang an original composition of his titled "Trees", and Dave Navarro instantly blurted "That's a hit song right there". The problem with Marty is that his voice and look is more inclined towards the American side of rockdom, like he can be mistaken for a lead vocalist of any grunge band anytime. If he fronts INXS, it could entirely change INXS' image, like suddenly they have become an American grunge band and not the classic Aussie band that they have always been known for. One thing, Tim Farriss thought he was very controlling. Marty said he just wanted to take the band towards another level. These "brave" words from Marty may have trespassed some INXS ego. Who the hell is this guy telling us what to do? And that would be his own undoing. But on the one hand, he may just be exactly the guy that INXS is looking for---someone that is very talented and with a very strong personality; one that can get his own way almost always.

Now comes J.D. He almost matched the songwriting skill of Marty with his original composition "Pretty Vegas" and which was even voted as the one song that the audience wanted to hear as an encore. J.D. got that perfect rocker's voice and he seems to also have that rocker personality although sometimes he looked like a boy band member---with his good looks and overly-cropped hair. And his strongest point is that his voice has a very strong resemblance to that of Michael Hutchence, rendering the same vocal inflections and emotional emphasis. In fact, when he sang "By My Side" as an encore in today's episode, he sang it so good that I thought Michael Hutchence suddenly came back from the grave. When I close my eyes and hear J.D. without looking at him (with his boyish look), I thought I was hearing the same INXS of old. Would INXS settle for the one rocker that could clone Michael Hutchence voice? Or do they want something new and refreshing? It is very hard to tell at this time.

...

Where Have They Gone, Those Dragonflies?

2005-09-13T19:52:00.000+08:00

When June came, rain started to pour over the arid soil of Zamboanga City that one could see puddles of rainwater littering the ground. The street just in front of our house was soaked in inches-deep floodwater that rose to my ankles whenever I waddle through it. Children playing nearby would almost always sully their arms and feet with mud and their clothes would surely get wet as they couldn’t resist disturbing the rainwater that had finally conquered the once dry surroundings.

The back of our house had suddenly become swampy too that I had suggested to my wife Evelyn that we do something about it. The evening news had made me extremely wary of spreading diseases brought about by insects trapped in stagnant waters like dengue or malaria. And so, we had to cover the swampy backyard with truckloads of filling materials and soon it was elevated enough that the water flooding all over it had virtually vanished.

In the weeks after, me and the kids would trooped to the now waterless backyard and attempted to weed out unwanted vegetations permeating there--those slinky grasses that could grow to almost the height of a regular adult. I had remembered that when I was a kid, I used to venture into these sorts of swampy areas where the bushes and vegetations were so robust and wild that one could get lost into it when not being too careful. In those kinds of places, I and a number of kids would go hunting for dragonflies and butterflies as if they were profitable commodities. We capture and trapped them, and then we just put them into jars until they wither and die or be able to flee from captivity. It was such a virtually a pointless activity (capturing dragonflies) but for kids like we were then, it was especially pleasurable. Maybe in kids, the primal nature of man as a hunter is more prevalent than we had ever thought before.

In our backyard, I was wondering why despite the wild growth of the grasses and other vegetations in the ground, I had not seen a single dragonfly gyrating through the air and hopping from foliage to foliage. The butterflies were also missing from my view. I wonder where they had gone. I had thought to myself that in my childhood days, dragonflies of variant colors and sizes would always enchant my eyes to no end and I would go after them, slowly and gently like a well-trained hunter, in order that they may not be alerted and flee unduly. Where have all those dragonflies gone? Why aren’t those yellow butterflies coming to visit the blooming bougainvilleas? I had these questions in my mind and had many theories about the sudden infrequency of these flying wonders in our urban jungles. Had urban decay and pollution shooed them away towards the faraway hinterlands? Or do dire weather changes push them closer towards extinction? Maybe, global warming is now finally showing its deadly pangs, and it becomes now the main culprit in the disappearance of specie like those of dragonflies and butterflies.

And then, last Saturday rain poured so hard in our city---much harder than ever before---that the floodwaters rose to extraordinary levels. There was a point there that I had thought rainwater would soon enter our living room. But luckily the rain stopped before everything got worst. The day after, I was wondering so much if the backyard would be turned again into a swampy place due to the extraordinary amount of rainfall the day before. I finally walked towards the backyard and check it out for myself. There was indeed some flooding but my fear of the backyard becoming swampy again was calmed immediately. The waters were so minimal. I walked slowly towards the center of the backyard and smelled the soil while it was still very early in the morning and the sun was still soft and radiant from the horizon. And lo and behold, I almost could not believe my eyes when I saw one huge red dragonfly just flew above my shoulder and then towards a wild growth of plants in the corner of the wall surrounding our backyard. I turned towards another direction and I saw many other dragonflies busily gyrating around like they were prisoners who had suddenly been allowed freedom and they were extremely happy for that. My heart was aglow and sweet memories of childhood came rushing all over again. And nearby, I saw a yellow butterfly slowly descending upon the leaves of an infantile Palmera and I couldn’t help but become aware of the fact that it was the first butterfly that I have ever seen in quite a long, long time.

Suddenly, like in a miracle, the dragonflies have come back again.

...

Governments Should Be Like Airline Companies

2005-09-08T13:16:00.000+08:00

It was quite sad to see the impeachment complaint reeling down the drain, like a washed up memento of everything that we need to fight for. I was really hoping that the truth could be given even just a moment’s chance to be tested by the fire, like in a full-blown impeachment proceeding against the President, irregardless if the President may eventually be exonerated or not---at least, in that manner, Congress had not resorted to such numbing insensitivity to the public’s cry for a thorough investigation of the alleged election anomalies believed to have been committed by her. Things like these ain’t suppose to get away so easily, otherwise we can half-expect that every election we will have from now on would most probably be rigged. And we have the present Congress to blame for that.

I can recall now, as we examine the sad state of our politics, an episode of Ally Mcbeal that was shown about five to six years ago. It was too long ago but because that episode was so interesting, I have always recounted the story to some of my friends from law school every now and then. In this particular episode, the team of Ally Mcbeal was suing for damages in behalf of nearly two hundred plane crash victim—the plaintiff’s side. As the case went on, the plaintiff’s side was very disheartened to learn that the investigators and aviation experts that was tasked to examine the crash site had found no single evidence whatsoever of negligence on the part of the airline company. In suing for damages in cases like airline accident, it becomes necessary that the plaintiff should prove that the airline company or its employees had committed some form of negligence or breach of care that is necessary for such sensitive industry. When negligence is not proven, damages or full compensation may not be had.

In this case within the TV episode mentioned above, the court could not seem to pinpoint to any wrongdoing on the side of the airline company and like one counsel for the airline company there said, “The plane just went down for no apparent cause”. No pilot error. No maintenance lapses. No engine trouble. No bomb explosions. Nothing. Nada.

And so when the day of reckoning came, the Ally Mcbeal team was not so encouraged by their chances of winning the case while the defendants were already almost celebratory. But then the unexpected happened when the judge finally handed down a judgment in favor of the Ally Mcbeal team, this despite that the investigation did not find any evidence of negligence on the part of the airline company. In the reading of the judgment, the court decided that while it is true that the plaintiff side was not able to prove negligence on the part of the airline company, still the airplane crash victims should be paid damages and their families fully compensated, for it had opined rather strongly that the court does not believe that airliners could just go down in flames without any reason. There must be a cause and this cause, the airline company should be held responsible for. The decision went on to say that the award of damages should give notice to all airline companies that from now on, they should do everything possible in this world to make sure that the safety of passengers are guaranteed by all means. They must do everything, anything lesser is not acceptable. They may have to train their pilots every month if it need be or do maintenance work more often than what is usual. They may have to discard their twenty-year old planes and buy new state-of-the-art aircrafts. They have to do everything to keep danger almost to a nil, if that is possible. Whenever an airliner goes down in flames and lives are lost, airline companies should always recompense the victims. No ifs and no buts.

Now here comes the analogy to the state of our nation. Governments should be like airline companies. The people it serves should not be force to accept malefactors and wrongdoings in the government by masking the truth or manipulating a political exercise. By all means, governments should remain morally intact in order that it becomes a primal force in urging the upswing of a nation, both economically and socially. Any taint in the face of the government that presently serves us should be dealt with accordingly, either by proving the accusations wrong or by just letting the public know the real score. So what’s the real score? The administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has so many things to explain and yet it had chosen to hide rather than be forward and answer every doubt cast upon its name. The mishandling of the truth may serve as a bad precedence in the future where a people becomes deserving of a tainted government and governments from now on may not care anymore to be morally fit because after all, an unfit government had been allowed to escape unscathed once before. This “act of Congress” will go down badly in the annals of our political history.

Like an airline company, governments should exert every effort possible in order that no airline crashes happen. Meaning to say, it should be ideal for a developing republic like us that our governments should not wallow into any dirt, like having its hand into Jueteng money because bribery is the one singular crime that had brought this nation down from its gloried past. And if talks of election rigging are so prevalent and pestering, the talks should not be allowed to die down. The truth must be uncovered. The GMA administration had preferred to be evasive, as if admitting something and yet not being ready to pay for it. In that sense, it had contented itself into becoming a government masked in doubt and disrepute rather than be a moral and upright one.

The Filipino people deserve a government that is moral and exemplary. But as of now, we will keep on looking for that, for we haven’t got it yet.

...

Who Can Handle The Truth?

2005-09-05T14:31:00.000+08:00

An umbrella organization called Bukluran Para sa Katotohanan now becomes a delta for “all the voices in the wilderness”, calling for the TRUTH to arise from this bedlam of political arm-wrestling and elbowing. I have always wanted the TRUTH to come out. When everything around us becomes a lie, there is only the TRUTH that we can lean upon. And so, through the initial persuasion of MLQ3, I now support this following declaration:

Statement of Unity
Bukluran Para sa Katotohanan

We come from all walks of life, from different political, cultural, and economic persuasions, different points of view. But in diversity, we find a cause for unity. That cause for unity is our common objective to secure the truth.

We all seek the truth. We want the truth to come out. And yet every means for seeking the truth has been frustrated; every avenue for arriving at the truth has been blocked; and every opportunity to find the truth is being closed.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s response to our call for the truth has been to suppress evidence, hide her accomplices, engage in a grand cover-up, sow fear, foment distrust and use every instrument at her disposal to encourage division among our people.

We will not be divided in these critical times.

We say with one voice, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo must go. For the good of the country, she must go. For the sake of our nation’s future, she must go. For the preservation of hope as a motive force in our national life, she must go.

We are united by the belief that this crisis must be resolved in a manner that is peaceful and democratic. Without the truth, there cannot be peace; without the truth, there is no genuine democracy. The truth must set our nation free.

Unite for the truth. Demand the truth. Defend the truth.

Kami ay ang Bukluran Para sa Katotohanan.
Action for Economic Reforms
AKBAYAN Citizen’s Action Party
Ateneo Concerned Faculty and Youth
Bangon, Pilipinas
Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN)
Be Not Afraid
Black & White Movement
Citizens for TRUTH (Transparency, Responsibility, Unity, Trust, Hope)
Citizens for Truth, Resignation, Impeachment, or Ouster (C4T)
Coalition for National Solidarity
Counsels for the Defense of Civil Liberties (CODAL)
De La Salle
FPJP Movement
Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC)
Interfaith Movement for Truth, Justice and Genuine Change (IFM)
Kilusan ng Makabansang Ekonomiya (KME)
Laban ng Masa
Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF)
Peoples Assembly for Genuine Alternatives to Social Apathy (PAG-ASA)
Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino (PMP)
Reporma
Union of Muslims for Morality and Truth (UMMAT)
United Opposition (UNO)
Unity for Truth and Justice
UP AWARE
UP Diliman Student Council (UPD USC)
White Ribbon Movement
Women March
Youth DARE

....

Katrina’s Wrath Remain Harsh Long After The Storm

2005-09-02T15:03:00.000+08:00

An American daily called it “hell in new Orleans”, and by the manner by which we now witness the ultimate devastation and ruin brought forth by the now legendary hurricane, then it might as well be. Hell it is and if it had a fury like a woman scorned, then the woman must come in no other name but “Katrina”.

I was glued the whole time yesterday to the international coverage of the giant storm’s aftermath on cable television and I was hoping I could catch a glimpse (by way of video documentation the actual onslaught of the hurricane) of how strong and ferocious it had been---did the houses sprung up into the air like broken dollhouses. Unfortunately, CNN had no such videos or if they had, they did not replay it anymore. Maybe, they were just too gruesome for comfort.

So I had to see the devastation through the flooded streets and overcrowding, and the misery painted in the faces of those who got stranded, the babies crying while being carried by their sweating mothers and old women drooping like they got the whole world on their shoulders. Apparently, Katrina’s aftermath had become such a colossal logistical crisis where flooding waters and smashed-up streets and bridges had made rescue efforts so darn difficult to carry out. It had also become a gung-ho police problem for the New Orleans authorities as lootings had become so widespread. There were reports of child-rape committed in one of the temporary shelters where overcrowding had rendered the situation there maddening and hellish. Some thugs have even controlled some areas of the locality that at one point, helicopters trying to deliver food and water encountered gunfires from what was reported to be random snipers. This could be what anarchy in America looks like---if it is not already.

As of this morning, President George W. Bush was speaking to reporters about how the rescue operations would entail huge amount of federal funds while his father, former President George Bush and former President Bill Clinton looked on at the wayside. Apparently, the White House was still in the stage of sourcing funds for the much-needed rescue operations and acted as if nothing was really urgent happening over there in New Orleans. Some dailies have reported how it took quite a while for the White House to get notice that there are actually thousands and thousands of hurricane victims being stranded in temporary shelters throughout New Orleans, Houston and San Antonio, without food, water and medical help in sight. People were actually dying there and President Bush was still “looking up for funds”. This seeming lack of action and urgency in Katrina’s aftermath is so unlikely of the American authorities and I couldn’t believe that the mayhem and devastation I was seeing on television was actually happening in America, the most progressive state in the world, and not in Jamaica or Somalia.

Where were the Chinooks and hummers that the U.S. Government used to flaunt all over the world? It seems to me that every modern equipment, materiel and gadgets that there is to have, the U.S. military has it. They are even giving them like peanuts to countries like the Philippines for anti-terrorism purposes, among other reasons. But now that their country needs it most, these useful equipments are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, they were all already sent overseas, in Iraq and Afghanistan among other places, and America has already none of them in their homeland. Now tell me if this is such "a responsible conduct".

What we see here perhaps is a symptom of President Bush’s overly outward sense of priority where White House had become so foreign-centered that whenever problems arises in their own country of the magnitude of Katrina, it becomes completely inutile in handling it, becoming overly-used already outside actions.

And one thought does not seem to escape my mind. Why is it that there is a very patent delay and laxity in responding to the devastation in New Orleans? I have noticed that those who were stranded and lay helpless in the streets of New Orleans were mostly black Americans. Would help had come much faster if those who lay homeless were mostly whites and not colored ones?

I could not believe my eyes that the most powerful country in the whole world struggles so pitifully in handling a giant storm’s wrath when they all have the much-needed resources in their hand. And I wish I am wrong but in this very modern age, America is still showing some hang-ups about its racist past, where there still remains alienation and prejudice against the colored people, and marginalization of those who are in the minority.

What was devastated was “black America”. And help had not come so soon. And it makes me wonder.
...

A Sensible Suggestion

2005-08-29T16:45:00.000+08:00

The House Committee on Justice is set once again to tackle today the most proverbial question lately: What impeachment complaint shall they grind and then decide upon? As we speak now, three distinct complaints are presently docketed before the aforementioned committee, first of which was filed by lawyer Oliver Lozano, where the tenor of the argument is that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has “betrayed the public trust” on account mainly of the Garci tapes. And then there was the amended complaint filed by several lawmakers from the opposition where aside from “betrayal of public trust”, it was additionally alleged that President GMA had violated the constitution as well as of bribing Comelec officials---among other crimes. Aside from these two complaints, there also was that of lawyer Jose Lopez who is said to be a “virtual copy” of the Lozano petition.

The long and protracted debate on whose complaint shall be received for actual deliberation by the house committee on Justice arises mainly from the constitutional rule that provides that only one impeachment complaint against the President shall be heard in any given year. Therefore, it becomes vital for argument purposes as to whose complaint it is that shall initiate the “one complaint” as prescribed by our laws.

On August 19, Former Justice Secretary Artemio G. Tuquero suggested that the three complaints could actually be merge and consolidated, thus doing away with the problem of possibly violating the rules on the initiation of impeachment proceedings. For me, this is the most sensible and sane idea ever to come out of this bedlam of opinions and hush-hushes. When Congress still has no permanent rule on the matters of form and substance of a proper impeachment complaint, it could still anytime propose and establish a rule where it could be allowed that two or more complaints could be merge and consolidated as long as they retain a reasonable semblance of tenor and arguments. In the present situation, since all three complaints are pointed against the same defendant, that is the President herself, the house committee on justice may motu propio (on its own) decide today to merge the three complaints and thus “creating” merely one complaint where it is incorporated all petitioners as complainants in such, and then listing in it all the particulars and basis of complaints, from betrayal of public trust to bribery. In this manner, it is completely avoided that one single complaint may violate the constitutional limitation on the number of impeachment complaint initiated against the President.

The suggestion presented above is never farfetched or strange since the regular Rules of Court also allows merger and consolidation of parties although in a much stricter way. Section 6 of Rule 3 of the Rules of Court allows the joinder of parties into a singular complaint where they all have similar causes of action arising from a transaction or series of transaction. The house committee on justice may just emulate this rule in order to resolve the present debacle at hand.

...

It’s Still A Long, Long Way For Iraq

2005-08-26T15:41:00.000+08:00

Early Wednesday morning, while doing their tasks for an American electronics company, three of our compatriots were caught in a crossfire somewhere in Kirkuk, Iraq’s most volatile northern region, and one of them just lost his life. Federico Samson once more typifies the sacrifices some of our countrymen make just in order to keep afloat amongst the ocean of poverty happening now in our country. When will it ever end? This violence…these killings…

The casualties kept rising and the reports of explosions over the streets and avenues of Iraq are mounting by the day and now we heard, the National Assembly is far from ready from finally putting up a draft constitution for the planned October 15 plebiscite, where the Iraqi will go to the polls once again in order to institute their most fundamental legal framework. But even that may not happen as scheduled when days past its supposed deadline, no proposed constitution was agreed upon by the three major sects---the Shiites, the Kurds and the minority Sunnis.

Apparently, the main conflict among Iraqi lawmakers lies not in any political or religious matters but revolves around the economic control of oil. Sunnis have complained that the present draft constitution could allow the Shiite to form an autonomous region in the oil-rich southern region, as a due course to the federal nature of the planned Iraqi government when the constitution is finally approved. The Sunnis are wary that Shiites may use this autonomy to shun them out of resources coming from oil. The Kurds are not unusually silent about the present draft since federalism would also allow them control of the oil-rich Kirkuk region. Meaning to say, their silence is a silent abeyance.

Aside from being the minority, the Sunnis populate areas that are not known for any oil deposit and a looser form of federalism may leave them mostly on the losing end. Once mighty as a ruling sect---where they controlled the Iraqi government under the regime of Saddam Hussein---the Sunnis could not seem to adapt to a newer environment where majority should rule.

The only way to solve this present stalemate is to reformulate the proposed Iraqi constitution where federalism may thrive while at the same time the resources of the entire Iraqi economy could be apportioned fairly among all regions, including those where oil are not drilled. Otherwise, these delays would only prolong the harsh days and nights where life and limbs are lost in the streets of Baghdad, like almost there is no end to it.

...

Gasoline From Corn

2005-08-23T15:38:00.000+08:00

What you see on the picture is nothing else than a stack of the lowly “corn”. But they won’t be too lowly for far too long. I have read this article from Newsweek about a couple of weeks ago and I just couldn’t help but share it to the readers here.

As you know, plants like corn, rapeseed, and the all-too-prevalent coconuts are fast becoming sources for what is now termed as “next-generation petroleum” or more commonly known as biofuels. Brazil (and also China) are right now far too ahead in the developent of biofuel technology and in fact most of the vehicles that runs through the rugged streets of Rio de Janeiro nowadays are already running on 20 percent ethanol, mixed with gasoline. In some form of vehicles, ethanol mix could reach as high as up to 40 percent. This set-up allows so much cost-saving in terms of fuel expenses among individual car owners and in a wider scale, Brazil as a country saves a lot of dollars from minimizing their oil imports, especially now in these “dangerous days” of $70 Dollars per barrel of oil in the world market.

Our country is currently finding out ways and means on how to curve energy use and thereby saving more on the ever-scarce dollars like avoiding gas-guzzling Expeditions, turning off unnecessary appliances and limiting workdays to four in a week. I think, what we must embark on now is a widespread and very determined effort to developed our own biofuel technology since plants and vegetations that are used as source for biofuels like corn and coconut trees could easily sprout everywhere in this all-too-fertile land of ours.

Like petroleum, biofuel that comes from corn and coconut could actually run a car when they are converted into ethanol and biodiesel. And if they could similarly run our power plants and factories, then our dollars may not have to leave our shores just in order to source that much needed petroleum.

The technology behind biofuels is not that complicated. Like in a cliché, it doesn’t have to take a rocket scientist just in order to handle it. The process is amazingly simple. Materials like corn and coconut are dried-up and then extracted of its oily elements. These procured oily substances are then processed by way of distillations until combustibility is attained. It’s amazingly simple and efficient.

Watch out for this vital development in the fuel industry in the coming months or years. It is said now that biofuel is the greatest challenge to the viability of petroleum as a main energy source. Maybe, OPEC is just pushing the red-button now (by skyrocketing the oil prices per barrel) knowing perhaps that the rise of biofuels as an alternative energy source would be soon forthcoming. Still, how I wish oil prices in the world market could stabilize at more reasonable level.

Photo Credits : Alamy Images

My Life In One Full Minute

2005-08-22T15:30:00.000+08:00

"Who Am
I?
I am Jean
Valjean!!!"
---From the musical,
Les Miserables

Last week, a temptress named Nao listed me as one of the bloggers that she would be interested in knowing more of. In short, I was once more tagged for a question-and-answer portion, to which I am just glad to comply with.

Frankly, among all the “tags” in the world, I have never felt more anxious than this one---although in such a fine way---since the questions presented here demands more of honesty and deep, profound introspection. Who am I? Where I’ve been? Where am I going to? These are queries that I need to know myself now as much as you do.

TWENTY YEARS AGO. I was thirteen years old and in that fragment of my past, I am ardently reminded of one unique and an altogether hilarious experience. I was so giddy one morning about going to school since it was my first day in Ateneo de Zamboanga as a freshman highschool student. Perhaps maybe then, I was just feeling so happy that I have found myself within the grounds of a classy school despite that my father Hussin A. Masdal, was just then a lowly employee of the city post office. It was thru the benevolence of my grandfather Unih, that I was enrolled in Ateneo, the one person who once took me in when I was still a toddler, and coddled me like his own child for many, many years, until the moment that I had to return to the fold of my parents, just about the time when I was already finishing elementary school.

On that first day of school, I decided to wear orange pants that an aunt gave me as a gift upon graduation from elementary school. All students were lining up for our first ever flag ceremony when suddenly I heard some snickering from somewhere behind me. I heard a voice whispered loudly, “Gee, with those orange pants, he should have gone straight to the city jail.” It suddenly came to me that particular moment that “orange” was such an unusual color for baggy pants. I thought it was stylish then but I forgot that prisoners wear orange pants similarly, causing some others in the crowd to make fun of them. I sweated hard that morning all throughout the flag ceremony, becoming overly conscious with my baggy orange pants. Since that day, I never wore my baggy orange pants ever again.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. I was eighteen and finally knew that I have the right to vote, Suffrage is such a memento of adulthood, I think. A mark of age,

It was about the time that my grandfather, Unih, passed away, at the old and ripe age of 81. At that age, you could say he had lived fairly long enough but his departure from this mortal world had such a telling effect on me, that I felt like the entire sky fell upon my shoulders. I was so saddened with grief that for a long time, I had a somber mood and a stooping gait. He was almost the most singular person that I dearly loved the most, and the one central figure that I have the healthiest amount of trust. But suddenly, I found him gone like smokes melting into thin air. Like upon a poem, he had been my East, my West, my North and South; my Sun and Moon; my morning, noon and evening; my morning star and my northern star when darkness comes. He was a wall that I had grown accustomed to leaning upon, and which suddenly had just disappeared.

Years after his death, my grandpa appeared to me in a vivid dream, amidst a falling rain at nighttime. He slowly appeared out of the rain and with a smiling countenance he asked how I was. I said I was just alright. He then handed me a ten-peso bill which I refused and said in response, “Maybe you’d need it more. Father gives me enough money now.” In reply, my grandpa said, “In that case, you will be just fine.”

And then he disappeared into the heavy rain once more. When I woke up from that dream, I immediately felt the loneliest of emotions that I wept like a child. There was grief and longing for a most beloved figure in my life, but then I had consoled myself in the thought that, thru that dream, I now believe that my grandfather is just out there somewhere, guiding me still and seeing me through and that someday I’ll be meeting him once again.

TEN YEARS AGO. I was about 23 years old and at that time, I could not remember much anything except stacks and stacks of law books which I had to read as I was then going into the junior years of my law schooling. And oh…I was elected the President of the University Student Council of the Western Mindanao State University later that year.

FIVE YEARS AGO. My eldest child, Sef-Sef was born and that momentous event in my life showed me that indeed, genuine happiness is something that money could not buy.

THREE YEARS AGO. I just failed my first and only attempt at the bar examinations. The world was heavy and the days were dim. I felt so gloomy then but I promised to try again and do better.

LAST YEAR. I should have been taking the bar again but family and other concerns did not allow me the right circumstances. Also, I started blogging sometime in the month of September.

THIS YEAR. Busy with some personal concerns and family matters. I continue blogging like never before.

NEXT YEAR. If I had the right frame of mind and if the circumstances around me are favorable than ever, I might just find myself in Manila once again taking review classes for September’s bar examinations.

TEN YEARS FROM NOW. Maybe, I’d be a lawyer by that time. It’s hard to foresee so much into the future. Or perhaps, in addition I would already be heading an organization that I have in my mind for so long now, a kind of a movement that you know, might just well be able to change the world---for the better.

WHO I WISHED WOULD TAKE THESE QUESTIONS: In my mind are the usual suspects. I hope that they won’t be so busy to answer these queries. Here in no particular order: Teacher Sol, Bing aka Juilet, Angelo, Sam, JP, Bokbok, Anicee, Trickyboy, Punzi, Jove, Glen, Abaniko, Jeff, Buffwings and Shalimar.

Dead Wrong!

2005-08-19T14:34:00.000+08:00

It seems like it was only yesterday that we had witnessed one of the more memorable international political image in recent years---that of former U.S. Secretary of State Collin S. Powell holding high in his hands what turned out to be a deadly amount of anthrax that he was then using as a visual aid (while he was trying in earnest to convince the U.N. Security Council to give “Gulf War II” a psychological go-ahead). He was then orating in support of his employer’s war plans, hollering in high booming voices that a time to kill and a time to make war in Iraq had finally come that particular moment.

But years after “Gulf War II”, and over $ 100 Billion Dollars spent on bullets and missiles by U.S. taxpayers, we still haven’t got any single hint that indeed Saddam Hussein had in his possession any substantial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). For now, Mr. Powell and America is just “dead wrong” about their findings.

On Sunday, CNN verges deep into the myth of Saddam’s chemical weapons and meaningfully exposes and investigates the truth behind the U.S. intelligence failure on such matter. In a CNN feature titled “Dead Wrong”, the Atlanta-based news network will try once and for all to unravel and perhaps prove rather conclusively that the U.S. intelligence network was way off the mark when it barked throughout the political world that Saddam Hussein was viciously detrimental to world peace and that he was then maintaining a sizeable arsenal of WMD’s. Perhaps CNN may just go beyond that and implicate America outrightly for being caught lying---in red-handed fashion.

This is not the first time actually that insinuations that America had lied to the world in order to pursue a war that is thousand of miles beyond American borders. In April of this year, a presidential commission had concluded in its final report that “the United States still knows ‘disturbingly little’ about the weapons programs and intentions of many of its most dangerous adversaries. In short, President George W. Bush may just have decided to lie in such a big way just in order to coax U.S. Congress to fund the most expensive war in recent history. Could he have intentionally allowed the manipulation of facts just in order to unduly justify an unjustifiable war?

America peddling half-truths is not already new to us actually. In the years leading to the Vietnam War, then President Richard Nixon was often seen declaiming the merits of sending American troops to southern Vietnam. It was then highly circulated by Nixon’s henchmen that if Vietnam will fall entirely to the hands of communism, the whole of Asia would soon follow---like dominoes collapsing one by one. We all know now what really happened. Vietnam did entirely fall to the Vietcong but still communism hasn’t made so much of a ripple in the rest of Asia, as feared initially. Did Nixon’s Vietnam war adventure a kind of a “dead wrong” scenario? It seems to be now that the huge casualties of war suffered by America in Vietnam was merely a result of one huge misapprehension.

Now, only history could decide if Bush’s war in Iraq is merely just “one huge misapprehension”.

Photo and Image Credits: CNN/ WikiPedia/ Warblogging.Com/

The Book Club Tag

2005-08-17T15:15:00.000+08:00

What's in a book?

In a book is an entirely distinct and living world that can move and fascinate us to no end. When it’s a very good book, it is a kind of world that I joyously venture into every time I leaf through the pages.

Number of books on the shelves: I buy so selectively when it comes to books so over the years, I haven’t piled up a mountain of such. But including my law books, my collection could perhaps fill one huge wooden cabinet.

Those that I own or bought: Ninety percent of my books are bought while about eight percent of them were given as gifts or tokens. The rest (about two percent) are those that I just forgot to return and still remained in my possession. To give you a hint about the kind of materials I read, here is a listing of some of my books:

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Death of Ivan Illych by Alexander Tolstoy
Interview With A Vampire by Anne Rice
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
The Ground Beneath Her Feet by S. Rushdie
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Finnegan’s Week by Joseph Wambaugh
Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Partner by John Grisham
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCollough
Primary Colors by Anonymous

Last few books that I bought:

The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown

Book that I'm reading now:

The Norton Anthology of World Literature

Last few books read: The Joy Luck Club. I have just finished re-reading this one. I always find time once in a while to do second readings of books that had affected me most in the past since upon second reading, there are aspects of the story that I have overlook on first reading but makes wonderful and sometime perfect sense upon second reading.

-------------

The Sevens

Seven Things That Scare Me

1. Drowning at sea.
2. Falling from great heights.
3. Facing a ghost at close range.
4. Evil spirits.
5. Snakes wiggling into the house.
6. Very enclosed spaces.
7. Murderous robbers.

Seven Things That I Like the Most

1. Travelling in countrysides.
2. Well, blogging.
3. Listening to records that I just bought and being excited on how it will fare with my expectations.
4. A glassful of chilled beer after a long and tiring day.
5. Eating Adobong Manok.
6. Playing and singing lullabies to my kids.
7. Reading, reading and reading.

Seven Important Things in My Bedroom

1. The computer.
2. The guitar.
3. The writing table.
4. The books and magazines.
5. The bed of course.
6. The electric fan.
7. The chair.

Seven Random Facts About Me

1. Like Warmstone, I am a Taurean.
2. I stand five feet and two inches.
3. An unpublished author.
4. Likes to grow my hair long but long hairs does not seem to suit me.
5. I fetch my kids from school every afternoon.
6. I play the drums once in a college garage band.
7. I like the color blue most that I possessed a lot of blue objects like hankies and shirts.

Seven Things I Plan to do Before I die

1. Get my books published.
2. Share the Good News.
3. Organize a spiritual movement.
4. Travel abroad.
5. See my kids working and in good stead.
6. Appear on TV.
7. Repent of all my sins.

Seven Things I can do

1. Write poems.
2. Climb mountains. Me and my friends use to climb mountains around here.
3. Sing a little of Frank Sinatra.
4. Cook my favorite food like Adobong Manok.
5. Drink until the morning comes.
6. Read for hours and hours.
7. Drive all kinds of vehicles except trains and aircrafts.

Seven Things I Can’t Do

1. Swim farther than 20 meters.
2. Intrude into a house.
3. Appear in a party uninvited.
4. Lie casually.
5. Kill animals.
6. Expect respect without respecting.
7. Tolerate abusive persons.

Seven Things that Attract Me to the Opposite Sex

1. Smooth skin.
2. Telling eyes.
3. Intelligence.
4. Wittiness.
5. Gentle persuasions.
6. Broadmindedness.
7. Of course, kindness.

Seven Things You Say the Most

1. Oh, Lord!
2. Oh, God!
3. Jesus Christ.
4. Please.
5. Oh, my God!
6. Uh-huh.
7. I.

Seven Celeb Crushes (whether local or foreign)

1. Beyonce
2. Jennifer Aniston.
3. Tanya Gomez
4. Zhang Zhiyou
5. Gong Li.
6. Lauren Hill of The Fugees.
7. Denise Richards.

Seven People I want to take this Quiz (any of the two)

1. JP
2. jangelo
3. Sam
4. Buffwings
5. Trickyboy
6. Shalimar
7. Anicee

I wish Bokbok and Punzi could take the quiz too. If they aren't that busy.

The Way The Music Died

2005-08-15T15:26:00.000+08:00

When the music is over….
Turn out the lights…
Turn out the lights…
---Jim Morrison, The Doors

Tonight, Studio 23's Newscentral will feature in its Frontline section a documentary about the music industry titled “The Way The Music Died”. I have gotten notice about this five-day series some three days ago and teaser scenes had urged me to bookmark it for my evening TV viewing starting tonight. Music runs in my veins and so I am mostly interested in every show that features music especially on documentaries that involve the comings-and-goings of the recording business.

At first, I thought “The Way The Music Died” is one expose on how piracy is eating up the music recording industry. We are all aware perhaps how musicians from here and abroad are noisily lamenting every time how bootlegging and illegal downloading had been affecting their industry in such a very bad way. In fact, a number of pinoy artists had trooped down to Fort Bonifacio last week to shout “Right To Royalty” in a mega-concert that was sponsored by MTV itself. For sure, I support their cause. Piracy is stealing by itself. So give them their royalties.

“The Way The Music Died” is not about music piracy though but it is a sort of an elegical exposition on how the art of music got cheapened by some unscrupulous music producers and artist who are just out there to make some quick buck. The program takes off with a grand lambasting of MTV, the thenera-changing off-beat music television channel that stormed into our consciousness and mindset in the middle of the 1980's and forever changed how we see and listen to our music. While many music lovers of today sing hossanas to the coming of the age of MTV, artists like David Crosby of the Crosby, Stills and Nash fame blamed it for turning music into purely a matter of money and fame and not of art. They say, MTV had encouraged the mushrooming of one-hit wonders instead of making music like in the old classic way, when every artist works so hard on their music that what comes out are always elevating and lasting. Surely, this documentary resents the existence of Britney Spears and the Puff Daddy’s in our midst, who had spawn merely ear candy and radio-friendly tunes. Fast tune means fast money.

I also question myself nowadays about “where the music had gone” but despite of that I maintain a "live-and-let-live" philosophy when it comes to musical taste and preference. I mean, I may not like Britney Spears or The Backstreet Boys but hey, this is a free world. I don’t mind one-hit wonders with simplistic tunes blasting out from the radio as long as I can have my kind of music when I want them---whenever and wherever. When I say music I mean---U2, REM, Led Zeppelin, Simon and Gurfunkel, Billy Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Morrisson and The Doors, The Refugees, Moby, Tracy Chapman, INXS, Andrea Bocelli, The Three Tenors, Ella Fitzerald, Antonio Jobim, Everything But The Girl, Black-Eyed Peas, David Bowie, Def Leppard, Neil Young, Lauren Hill, The Dawn, The Eraserheads, Rivermaya, Yano, Asin, Joey Ayala, Apo Hiking Society, True Faith, Maria Callas, Jimi Hendrix, the broadway musicals, Sting and The Police, Tony Bennet, The Beatles, K.D. Lang, Pearl Jam, Sinead O' Connor, Bruce Springsteen, Oasis, Bon Jovi, Guns N' Roses, The Clash, Morrisey and some, some…..

So …when did the music died?…The music did not die. It only took a short vacation.

Twin Bomb Rocks Zamboanga

2005-08-11T13:59:00.000+08:00

Two powerful explosions rocked this southern city of Zamboanga in the early hours of last night. When the first bomb went off at a little past seven o' clock, I was completely unaware of it except that when my wife finally arrived home after attending an evening mass at the nearby St. Joseph Church, she was almost out of breath as she recounted how the people downtown was caught in great panic and commotion the minute they heard the blast. I turned on the radio immediately and caught the boisterous on-site reporting from newsmen, narrating vividly the extent of the damage and harm.

Approximately thirty minutes later, the second bomb exploded that even when I was in the solace of our living room, I had clearly heard of the explosions as if they were just nearby. The bomb reverberated through the Zamboanga evening sky and one could easily reckoned how powerful the second bomb was. Even though our house is just barely a kilometer away from the city hall, it is still quite disturbing that we could hear the explosions while we were rested in the harbor of our homes, clearly indicating the harshness of the bombs.

It is quite untoward to say that it's a relief to have learned later on that no one was killed despite the strength of the explosions, yet it's truly fortunate that it is so because in the past, the victims were not only maimed but their lives lost so violently. The injured totaled to nearly 30 persons but nobody died last night.

Still, everytime this sort of incident disturb our city, there is no such thing as a feeling of relief but only of dismay and disgust. It has been happening since the time I could remember, even into my childhood. Every now and then, bombs would throw our place into panic and confusion; infusing fear and terror into our very hearts, seeking more and more division among Muslims and Christians here, as if we haven't had enough. Clearly, this thing had always been happening and it is so very unfortunate. Mayor Celso Lobregat, speaking on national radio, urge the city dwellers not to show fear for it is what the bombing perpetrators aimed to do, striking fear into our minds and hearts, but saying is one thing and fear would always be there, and panic is always something that we have to contend with. When will it ever stop---these violence in the midst of our city---no one ever knows.

When There's No Getting Over That Rainbow

2005-08-10T14:46:00.000+08:00

On this wet rainy weather, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo might just well be humming this old love tune, the one we remember so well from the 70's popular duo The Carpenters for so it seems, the President is never over the hill...or beyond the bend....or over that rainbow. Once again, a virulent witness has been set loose against her, to further untangle her hold on the Presidency.

Army Captain Marlon Mendoza sounds like a man so sure of what he is doing; unlike those who have backpedalled like Air Force T/Sgt. Vidal Doble and weeping witness Richard Garcia. This military man seem to be standing steadily upon his own two feet. He sounded so forceful and his tone is of definite certainty. As he testified this morning before the Senate Committee inquiring upon GMA's involvement in the illegal numbers game called "jueteng", his voice came out almost like a shout, so resoundingly as if he is angry of something, so angry that he has something to let out. He is a man on a mission---like a mad dog that is so one-minded about its aim. In fact, it was reported earlier that Captain Mendoza had received warnings from his military superiors before his appearance in the Senate to the effect that he'd be in violation of certain rules set forth in the Articles of War (the body of rules governing proper military conduct and behavior), but nevertheless he still presented himself before the Senators, on the right time and place of appointment.

Looking from the Malacañan's perspective, Captain Mendoza is such a dangerous man, one that can do the most damage. He maybe perhaps the one witness they had wanted to retract but he seems now to be the one who just got away. You can't have the one you wanted most. Being a former bodyguard of Ex-Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcilliano, he had testified to have first hand knowledge that Bong Pineda, the now notorious jueteng lord from Pampanga (and generally believed to be a GMA crony) had funded some 300 Million pesos worth of election rigging activities in the Mindanao region, and the one who spearheaded such uncouth activity was none other than Garcilliano himself with Michaelangelo Zuce working in the wings. Captain Mendoza had even showed some photos where Zuce was showed in some uncompromising scenario while he was in Mindanao.

The coming out of Captain Mendoza is like a hurricane that is inclined to bring havoc and permanent damage to the Arroyo administration. I am sure Malacañan is now burning candles by the hour finding out ways and schemes on how to counter this seemingly surprising move by opposition that caught them...well, in great surprised. It's like a "shock and awe" method being used by the Arroyo detractors. Let us see in the coming days who makes the better move in this real-life and life-sized chess game.

Would the ARMM Elections Give Us A Revitalized ARMM?

2005-08-08T15:32:00.000+08:00

By 11:00 A.M. this morning, it was reported in the news that 50% of the expected number of voters have alreday trooped to the polling lines in the ARMM Gubernatorial Elections being held today. Maybe I just misheard the news anchors but its quite amazing how the said localized elections had such a high turnout of voters.

There were times in the past that low voter turnout was such a perennial problem in our national politics but here today, the people in ARMM shows us how exuberant they are in exercising their political rights.

What does this development tells us? Maybe the ARMM is such a succesful political entity that residents there are so eager to put up with their elections? Or are they just so in a hurry to kick out the present ARMM administrators for making their lives more miserable than worthwhile.

The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao had been in existence since the early 1990's; November 6, 1990 to be more specific as the due effect of Republic Act 6734 during the tenure of the then President Corazon C. Aquino. One significant positive outcome of the institution of the ARMM is the secessation of extreme hostilities between the government and the then still-active Moro National Liberation Front, although armed conflicts remain a disruption in Mindanao as perpetuated by other antagonists of the government like the MILF and Abu Sayyaf. But economically, the ARMM region remains the poorest among the provinces in the Philippines despite the pouring of billions of funds from the national government. Under Nur Misuari, the most popular icon of the Moro movement in the south, the ARMM region still did not find salvation from the economic doldrums that it was in. It is like upon a place trapped in time, not moving forward and not even sideward., like a dead log.

Left and right, stories and hush-hushes of massive corruptions were everywhere. I once had an acquiantance working for the ARMM administrators and thru him, I heard such horrifying stories of shenanigans in the government like for example such official who had pretended to have his official vehicle crashed through a mountainside, using another old and crippled vehicle of course, when in fact he just took home the brand new Revo that was issued to him by the government. There were many other such narrations but it will take us from night till dawn to put them up here. I heard such other horror stories where a great number of government workers there does not receive their salaries for several months while the money is still in the bank being enfattened with interest. Sometimes the teachers and government clerks there received only half of their pay where the other half of their hard-earned cash goes somewhere into the pockets of unscrupulous officials who had become devoid of conscience not being able to consider that these workers need to feed their children also.

But lest I may generalize, these stories may just be overblowned but how I wished the new ARMM officials, after they are elected in today's election, would find it in their conscience to honestly serve a region already wrecked by extreme poverty. Let not mismanagement there make the lives of our muslim brothers there more difficult and miserable. I hope those who will win the ARMM elections today are heroic individuals who will aim and pursue to no end, and without rest or respite, the upliftment of a land and people that had seem to be forgotten by time and space.

Brutally Frank

2005-08-05T15:18:00.000+08:00

The way Representative Antonio Eduardo B. Nachura said it in an early morning radio interview, it was like its the saddest thing in the world to happen. But I had a feeling that he was just being brutally frank. Guesting as an impeachement resource person for the said radio show, he explained rather elaborately that despite the fact that the impeachment proceeding was "a legal proceeding" it is also "a political exercise". Meaning to say, the viability of the amended impeachment complaint now filed in the justice committee of the House, or the chances of it being passed on to the Senate for the full staging of the impeachment proceeding, is not to be determined whether or not the complaint is meritable. According to Congressman Nachura's own words, "its merely a game of numbers" and even proceeded to inform the public that at present, those who favored in dismissing the complaint are in the majority while those who want President GMA impeached is in the minority. As if stressing to me what is alreday obvious.

Could not the congressman from Samar be less straightforward? So that hindi naman masyadong obvious na moro-moro lang ang mangyayari sa justice committee? I have a feeling that the members of the said committee won't even seriously deliberate upon the merits or demerits of the complaint. The die was cast even before the committee had received it. It's gonna be like a fools' banquet out there in the justice committee where everyone would just be playing dumb and then proceed to count those who are in favor and those who are not.

I have the greatest respect for the ever-venerable congressman from Samar, being one of my bar reviewers in the past in Political Law, and especially now he being touted as the prime expert on matters of constitutional law; but when he admitted that the very survival of the amended impeachment complaint against GMA is just but a game of numbers among the members of the Lower House, then as if he was really egging me to completely lose respect to a legislature which he is a famous member of.

Zuce: Is He For Real or Just Another Fluke?

2005-08-04T15:19:00.000+08:00

If much of the words of Michaelangelo Zuce are true, then perhaps he is the best thing that the impeachers have in their hands. Consider this, witnessing a full-scale secret/private meeting of a generous number of election officials in the most private hospice of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is such a telling circumstance that the GMA-defenders just could not handle this time. It would be too damning to ignore and set aside. If that meeting really took place, I am pretty certain that the truth will rise like a rushing flame exploding towards the sky for how could one possibly hide such very “noisy” strategizing from the election cohorts of GMA. Indeed, if the meeting really took place, it would be so difficult to hide that eventually the truth will come out.

In such a huge gathering, upon a certain night and in such a span of hours, the La Vista neighborhood would surely notice that so many vehicles are just outside GMA’s residence. Maybe we can ask one or two of the President’s closest neighbors there. But then, one could always say, since it is the President’s home, normally the outside her house would always be full of vehicles, and of course visitors from near or far would always be in her house, no matter what hour or day.

Or maybe, we can ask the security officers manning the La Vista neighborhood that particular night, that in these modern times, maybe they had security cameras put up at the entrances and exits of the La Vista neighborhood (since I presumed it is another well-secured and grand subdivision around Manila), which by then we could requests certain security personnel to testify if on such day and on such hours, a certain amount of vehicles had indeed came through the gates of the now suddenly famous neighborhood.

Or perhaps, one of the regional directors or election supervisors would suddenly become another turncoat and corroborate Zuce’s testimony. With the number of officials said to be present in that one famous meeting, the possibility of another witness against GMA is just too great and wide.

Only my mind questions a couple of things about Zuce’s words. Could GMA be that foolish to have a mass “give-outs” to so many officials all at once? Could she have allowed it knowing the risk of detection is far too great? And why so little the now almost mythical amount of “thirty-thousand pesos”. I am not rich but I know that such amount is too little in order to sway someone’s acquiescence to partake or allow what clearly is a dangerous maneuver to rig the election results and patently it is such a malevolent act. Such a small bribe, eh? Maybe it was an advance for a bigger amount.
The soap opera is getting interesting by the day. It would be interesting to know in the following days if Zuce is for real or just another fluke.

LIVE 8 for the Debt. LIVE 8 for the Bomb.

2005-08-01T15:40:00.000+08:00

LIVE 8, that veritable movement that desires to end poverty in this world and drop-dead all third world debt is for certain (one way or another), succeeding in its main mission, as the concert series it held all around the globe was well-patronized and hugely attended. Then maybe, we could hope that perhaps now, the plight of poor people in the poorest of nations should be alleviated significantly.

How I wish there is a similar project, albeit in a scale smaller than LIVE 8, which would hark the need for world peace, primarily in combating the proliferation of nuclear weapons, thus protecting this generation and every generation to come from the specter of nuclear annihilation.

We may not know the extent of the problem now but as I see it, we are almost sitting on a time bomb, traipsing on a hotwire, as if in a circus act that provides no safety net that could stifle any fall.

We see somehow that the talks on North Korea disarmament is gaining grounds with South Korea Deputy Song Min-Soon baring to the public that a new draft on the result of the latest round of talks have been approved by all sides (including the United States of America) and opined that “the talks are rather doing well”.

But the comment above by the South Korean delegate is at most too general and vague and what we know is that North Korea is still demanding so much from the United States like security guarantees and massive financial aid, and it wanted them delivered fast before any disarmament happens while on the one hand the United States wanted to see the nuclear weapons disarmed first before obliging to any concession. This is where the main problem lies where we could see a Catch-22 situation looming. Another difficulty would be the adamancy of North Korea in demanding that it retains “peaceful nuclear development” at any rate. I do not think U.S. would give in to this, especially now that the risk of proliferation is all too high. (There is always the danger that some rogue nation or terrorist organization might get hold of this technology.)

North Korea is such a “hermit kingdom” that we just could not trust anything it says or do. And for that, we seem always to be on the verge of global nuclear trouble. I hope LIVE 8 people could address the global problem on nuclear weapons call on the world just to throw away all rhetoric and just dismantle that nuclear bomb.

Federalism: A Kind of Child Speak.

2005-07-28T15:04:00.000+08:00

We all know about that old time joke where a certain politician promises to build some bridge in a remote locality during one election campaign sortie when someone from the crowd bellowed, “But Sir, we have no rivers here!” The politician then said, “No problem. We will build the river first.” Ha...ha…ha…This is one political joke that never fails to muster a good laugh from me, its ridiculousness is so humongous. It is so funny because somehow, the comedy speak some truth on how politics is run in this part of the globe---how rotten it is sometimes, if not most of the times. All promises, and no action.

Now, the recent move to suggest the institution of a federal system of government in our beloved country is not as ridiculous as the joke above but somehow, it is similarly preposterous and could border on the ludicrous. Not that it is an appalling system of governance altogether. In fact countries under this sort of administration are mostly affluent like Germany and Canada, not to mention the United States of America. For all we know, federalism may in fact stifle some disenchantment from some parts of the country like in Mindanao resulting from the supposed improper distribution of wealth and State resources, especially in the distribution of infrastructure developments. We all know that suspected maxim always (that bad and mean formula), where the country gets its revenues from the rich Mindanao heartlands while on the one hand lavishing the northern regions with all these riches. Clearly unfair if I may say. Now federalism could solve this problem. But the question is: “Can we afford it now?”

The institution of a federal system of government here in our lands would entail gigantic cost for it will demand so much of our already scarce State resources. In that system, each “state” or region would have to have its own legislature and Supreme Court and would have to rehash the system of governance so completely to the effect that every major public agency would have to be reformulated and overhauled. This would mean a budgeting nightmare while at the same time so very time-consuming.

Federalism is good idea but it won’t be “a manna from heaven” or a fool-proof formula for economic success and besides it would necessitate a lot of experimentation, which we could not afford at this time. It is so expensive that it won’t be worth trying. If the need for change is really adamant and steeply urgent, we can just bat for a simple parliamentary system like in France or Great Britain. No frills and it come cheaper.

Garci, Garci Where Are Thee?

2005-07-28T15:00:00.000+08:00

In law, there is such thing as proof beyond concrete or material evidence and these is called circumstantial evidence. It is a sort of evidence where the truth can be fairly determined through the happening or not happening of certain conditions and incidents and though it is not as strong as direct evidences like fingerprints and testimonies, circumstantial evidence often consolidates the courts hold of the truth of the matter.

The weakest of all these sort of evidence is the "alibi" where usually a defendant would aver that he or she is in some other place while the crime or wrongdoing was being committed. Because it is often used in many criminal cases, it is somehow the least considered by the court. Did you know that the way you act or behave in a courtroom, while being interrogated or while giving testimony, is one way of knowing if one is guilty or not guilty, or telling the truth or not telling truth? It is called “the demeanors” of the witness on the stand. Judges often observe the actions and behaviors of witnesses and even of some other persons in the court, like the suspect himself or the counsels present there. While the written court decisions would not reflect that a judge had noted some “demeanors” of the witness or the suspect, we could be certain that often, the judge had penned and decided upon the case while depending on his/her observation of the “demeanors” of those present in court.

The strongest I think among this sort of evidence (circumstantial) is the so-called “plight” of the one most probable to have committed the crime or wrongdoing. When a suspect flees even before any search warrant is issued, you can be rest assured that 90 percent of the time, he would be guilty. More so if one is already out on bail. If while on bail, one flees, then for certain the judge would decide the case against thee. You can bet on that.

Now comes to my mind the alleged disappearance of ex-Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcilliano, where by recent reports which I have gathered from the radio, was to have been seen in the Changi Airport of Singapore upon a connecting flight to London. As you know, NBI agents have been tasked to issue summons to the beleaguered commissioner in order for him to appear in a legislative inquiry.

But Garci is nowhere to be found. He is close to being termed as one who is in “plight” from the hands of justice. And remember, plight is often an admission of guilt.

The Bonfire of The Vanities

2005-07-24T19:14:00.000+08:00

I am certain that many of us may be familiar with Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities”; a remarkable and era-defining book that chronicled the life of a certain New Yorker named Sherman McCoy, probably is his worst times, where at the beginning a slight car-accident tossed his life into a steep downward spiral that got worse and worse as each page is turned. There was his mistress and there was his wife and then a criminal case boiled to the hilt until the whole story climaxed into probably one of the most memorable ending in the entire history of American literature. This is a story where one bad thing gets into another bad thing, until it seems that excrements hit the fan. And foremost, this novel reminds me of the “state of our nation” nowadays; where the excrement also hits….you know what.

What we see here is a bonfire of every inanity seems possible, where it seems to me that one bad thing gets into another bad thing in this beloved country of ours. Is this what we call the disease called “The Banana Republic Syndrome”? Why can’t we be just as boring as Japan or perhaps as grandiloquent as Tahiti? Where nothing sordid can happen in these places for months and years except news on economic overheating in the case of Japan and the increase of tourism in the case of Tahiti.

But in our side of the globe, each day now bears something scandalous or mind-numbingly disgusting, and at some point, we have become a huge comedy show, with every clown and funny characters on hand, like perhaps “The Monty Python ” or a gypsy traveling show. We see the politician with his own SONA, or “TSONA” as he called it. Nothing like this happen except in this filibuster-rich country of ours. Of course, we all heard the bedroom voice of the former COMELEC guy who won’t appear in Senate, and smiles like he has more secrets to hide than Monalisa. It’s a deceiving smile from a deceitful guy as I see it. And then we heard about the Sandra Cams and the presidential sons and fathers being entangled in the web of “Juentenggate”, and got cannoned by a spitfirish and crusading priest from the Northern Lands (you know, Luzon mainland) and the last we heard about them, they took an indefinite vacation in the land where there are at least two Disneyland sites, in addition to Michael Jackson’s “Neverland”. I bet they’d be opting for the latter if they need some comical relief.

And then there was the congregation of bishops convening like the cardinals did in Rome when Pope John Paul II passed away, letting us wait in mortal thrill only to learn that they have taken the safest side while a former lady president took the other side, as if biting the bullet, and felt her admonitions backfired together with the also-comical “HYATT 10”, who thought the people would troop to take breakfast orders from handsome Hyatt waiters the moment they shoot the President behind her back----but the people didn’t. It’s the Hyatt for goodness sake. Nobody goes there except those who drive Rovers and Benzes.

Then before we were able to take a needed breather, the military underground specter soon appeared in the form of old-hat but still dangerous Young Officers Union, coming into the fray, muddling everything and making us fear again like we never have been fearing all these times. As if we hadn’t had enough. We heard about the assassination plot against the President. The inane Truth Commission. The upstart impeachment complaint. The call for charter change. The downgrading of our credit ratings from investment bodies in the First World. The mistresses of an Isafp alleged wiretapper. The lambastings of Susan Roces-Poe. The “bastos” side of the DOJ Secredretary speaking about Kris Aquino. I could go on and on listing all these inanities and we can go on till dawn tch gobbles us up.

Gee…don’t you feel like we are living inside a movie or a television soap-opera. Are our politicians acting it out right? Or are just they being bad actors and actresses? We seem to have been part of this bonfire that should be poured gasoline by the gallons and lit into the high heavens so that our misery shall go away along with the consuming flames.

When The Truth Is Just But A Waste of Time

2005-07-21T15:34:00.000+08:00

Senator Rodolfo Biazon is not a lawyer by training or by occupation yet he sees something what men of laws does not see, or haven’t notice just as yet. Biazon referred to the mapping out of a “Truth Commission” as direly unconstitutional and he was the first public figure to have mentioned that, at least in my case.

On the outset, nothing really in the formation of a “Truth Commission” that run directly counter against the precepts of our Constitution. Nothing in there would prohibit it straightforwardly for nothing in our fundamental laws that declares, “The State shall not cause any Truth Commission to exist…blah…blah…blah…”. Commissions are everywhere in our land. Commission on this, commission on that. We seem to have a commission for everything found above water; and even under it.

Let us remember however that the envisioned “Truth Commission” is not just any other commission like say the one on good government (PCGG) and on horseracing (PHILRACOM). It is a sensitive body with only one predecessor in recent memory and would act not like a commission at all, but more like a court of law, and this is where the problem lies, as it becomes a patent redundancy to our judicial systems. Why the hell did we have courts of law in the first place?

The “Truth Commission” would be a fact-finding outfit just like the Agrava Commission back in Marcos years, and similarly, it would take on a very high profile and extreme visibility. It will have the sine qua non power of summons and orders, the examination of testimonies and the production of evidences. This is why it becomes a freak of administrative fiat where a platypus is created, where it looks like a combination of many things, a non-judicial body having foremost judicial powers. Well, we all know that other administrative agencies like the LTFRB already has quasi-judicial functions yet I have a feeling that the “Truth Commission” would be demanding more than just petty judicial muscles because in order for it to be effective as it is visualized, it must have more teeth than what is necessary. Everything except the power to convict and imprison.

This is where my problem with this commission comes in. In the end, all it can give us would be some lame endorsements for prosecution because no matter how it finds the “truth” or the “untruth”, it won’t convict anyone and being a GMA creation, what makes us believe that nobody is telephoning somebody again in the dead of the night, telling somebody else to make some “small” favors. Aren’t we just fooling ourselves?

And mainly, the “Truth Commission” would be such a redundancy to our crime-solving bodies, especially to our courts of law, that it becomes entirely violative of the “due process clause” of our Constitution. For the commission to yield the complete truth, then it must have the presence of former COMELEC Commissioner Garcilliano before it, including his admission or non-admission, otherwise the truth is not complete. If you were Garcilliano, would you appear in it knowing your rights and liberty may be jeopardized without the due process of law? In this sense, the formation of the “Truth Commssion” would be gravely UNCONSTITUTIONAL, patently in contravention of the due process requirements of our Constitution where it is inculcated in it like gravestones that “no life, liberty or property may be taken by the State without the due process of law” and the “Truth Commission” does not partake of due process and due notice. Due process demands other legal modes like warrants of arrest, search warrants, right to counsel and right to remain silent, the right of confrontation, the production of testimonies and evidences, the presumption of innocence, of custodial investigation and such other like matters as embodied in the Bill of Rights.

In the end, the “Truth Commission” would just be a grand wastage of public money, a grand spectacle and a carnival full of clowns. We the public will not benefit from it except the “entertainment” that we could possible get from it. Oh yes, we Filipino love this kind of real-time, real-life soap operas.

We might as well bat for and support the institution of an impeachment proceeding against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, where despite the odds in numbers of Senators in her favor, there always remain a chance, when she would be found almost guilty of election rigging, that we will get the result we wanted. We need results. And a “Truth Commission” would never give us the result that we desire if finally the “truth” or “untruth” is brought into the great wide open.

The London Subway Experience

2005-07-20T14:43:00.000+08:00

If memory does not fail me, I believe I was tuned in to CNN the very moment numerous blasts shook the length of London, as breaking news just came in announcing in such a dire manner that something so grave happened beneath the streets of London, in its labyrinth subways. The grievous incident came almost exactly a day after I was stuck to the same cable news channel taking part in the exhilaration of an Olympic city selection, which by some coincidence, was won by this city now thrown into tumult and confusion.

What follows then, for hours after hours, nothing was televised by the Atlanta-based CNN except that singular shot of a London street where apparently the bombs hit the worst. As I see police officers cordoning the entrance to the subways and people strutting away from the scenes of explosions, I was then hoping that it wasn’t any bomb that rocked the city at all, that city so famously known by many of us by way of the children song we often sang then, about some bridge falling down and a fair lady. I was in fact wishing that somehow some major power breakdown occurred, one that may have cause certain damage but not as sinister as a terrorist act. I was then more inclined to believe that some electrical machinery might have malfunction causing the five simultaneous explosions, crossing my fingers on this.

But hours after, it was confirmed beyond doubt that the explosions were caused by bombs let off by identified terrorists, and was even tagged as perpetrated by a close allies of Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair referred to the attacks as a craft of an “evil ideology” and not by a “clash of civilizations”, between Moslems and Christians or by the West against the East. I agree with Mr. Blair so thoroughly on this. These importuned acts must not bring more division amongst the peoples of the world, where there are already enough torment brought about by prejudice and misunderstanding among the world’s many cultures and race. I know Islam as a belief does not in any way foment these kind of beastly acts, where innocent people die in vain, dying for the cause of false assumptions and crooked objectives. I must know somehow.

Almost two weeks had passed after 7/7 (what the London subway incident is now more widely known), but still my mind can’t escape examining the humanity within such horrendous event. It was so dire for me to try to understand and contemplate on what kind of hate or what magnitude of anger does some individuals have for them to ever think of taking away the lives of ordinary people who are the fathers of some daughters, the mothers of crying sons, brothers and sisters of those who grieved (In fact, the sister of one of our fellow bloggers, Shalimar, was one of those affected in the incident), and children of those who would mourn so gravely. Are they devoid of such human consideration? Have they lost their entire senses? Have they lost any hint of humanity and became beast themselves whose face only them could comprehend? I could not fathom their logic and neither will I understand their notions.

And as the blood of the innocents lay spilt on the tarmac, do they howl like hyenas in celebration of their violent exertions? I bet they are evil and killing innocent people is not lesser than the handiwork of Satan.

My Funny Revolution

2005-07-13T19:13:00.000+08:00

And so it seems that in this beloved country of ours, mob revolution is one familiar feeling that we are feeling again, just like in a song. Just like Valentine’s Day or New Year’s Day, where every so often, from time to time, it comes to us and happens almost as if we had expected it to happen once in every number of years, or even in every generation passing.

If once again, the angry marches in the wide avenues of Manila would spark again “an unforgettable fire”, one that would never be put off and continues to rage until it brings down once again yet another government, I have this strange but certain feeling that this will not be the last time that we will march on the streets to urge a bedeviled leader to step aside, or step down due to some colossal indiscretions. Even if we change the seat of power now, “people power” would be like Valentine’s Day that we could expect it almost to come after the passing of quite sometime. Future governments may still be disturbed upon their sleep, over burning beds, to be besieged once more by the specter of a systemic transitional process that can now be considered entombed as an “invisible law”, one that is unseen and unwritten but strong enough that it can be likened to rushing giant waves that could scuttle away even the mightiest of cliffs. Somehow, it is beneficial to us this “invisible law” for we keep our leaders up on their toes, but are we really comfortable with this vicious cycle? Only if we were in a parliamentary form of governance where by then, we need no more enormous marches on the streets and parkways, and where violent military takeover may not be as threatening as it is right now.

Today, hordes of soul marches again down the carless avenues, risking life and limbs and surviving the penalties of the weather as well as the pangs of hunger in their tummies. The drum beats roll once more to the suasions of a hundreds of thousands of souls--angry souls--that thunders down the alleyways, all the way to Malacañang where someone is for sure crossing her fingers, wishing so darnly that the miracle of the “people power” would not descend upon us once more, at this particular time.

Let me reminisce once more. I remember those slow but excruciating hours leading to the downfall of then President Joseph Estrada; those dangerous hours that is so familiar to us at these very moments, where everything seemed to have happened so fast that the braggadocio of a macho President sputtered away pitifully like dried peas and when the smoke had cleared, we saw the once mighty President ushered away by the very people who were once his strength but later on became his captors.

Indeed, I can softly remember those days when I had taken it that President Estrada could seem to do no wrong before the eyes of a continually forgiving public, like he could go away from murder, where it had seemed the people who had rocketed him to the highest seat would forever be starstruck by his legend as an affable and indefatigable movie icon. But the worst things indeed happened as his people walked out of him one by one until the military, that ever requisite factor of a successful uprising, finally quitted on him, and urge him to step down almost upon gunpoint.

And now today, as we hold our breath, everything may happen so fast, like lightning. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo should examine all her sides, especially the police and the military, and check on her loyalties often like she breathes, and to expect almost everything that is worst and hope that tomorrow will be another day and every document in Malacañang would still bear her signatures. The sun will come out tomorrow as the old familiar song says.

Where do I stand on this you might ask? Only if we could determine beyond doubt that GMA had really cheated in her winning the last presidential election, then it would have been easier to take sides. For certain, the cheater has no business ministrating upon millions of Filipinos suffering already from economic woes and won’t take anymore yet another rotten governance.

As a student of law in the past and until now, I was trained to respect the Constitution and hold it dear like a fragile but all too rare and precious of gems. We have been inculcated to see it that way, to respect and revere the Constitution like it is the Holy Grail, to protect it at all cost and from every trespasser.

If it were up to me, I hope violent transfer of power would not ensue and no blood of any of our countrymen would be spilt on the tarmac of revolution. Constitutional transfer of governance is deemed the best solution, if not the only solution.

Setting aside the present constitution may prove to be all too costly for us and in fact may be gravely time-consuming. We may have to painfully pass thru a messy labyrinth of conventions, plebiscites and arduous campaigning only to expect that another “people’s revolution” may scuttle it away in the future---like we are Sisyphus ever pushing that rock over the steep hill. It may seem like we are always destroying temples and rebuilding it in three days, like we are all like Christ Himself.

If the angry street marches we have now may become overly thundering, GMA may be left with no choice but to face impeachment for betraying the public trust, or resign her office outrightly. By then, the Vice-President may assume the empty seat as the constitution mandates. This way, we can evade bloodshed and at the same time preserve the constitution.

And by then, all sectors---the government, the opposition leaders, the religious people, the businessmen and the civil society---may come together at some appointed time and place, like in a summit, and determine wholeheartedly if we really need to shift to the parliamentary form of government, where we can change bedeviled leaders without risking lives and limbs and without doing away with constitutions which we have spent for and sacrificed for so heavily, and where general violence as a manner of takeover may be not as threatening as it is at present.

The Ingredients of A Revolution

2005-07-11T17:09:00.000+08:00

These are dangerous days. Something is cooking. It seems to me that almost every element of a modern-day revolution are already set in place and we are waiting on a standstill, just standing above a vocanoe that is about to explode.

Consider this. If one is to cook a revolution, what he or she needs are the following ingredients:

1. A President embroiled in a major scandal, say a whistling buzz on gambling payolas.

2. A First Lady or First Gentleman fiddling into marvelously and ubitiqously dirty activities.

3. A presidential son or daughter earning the public's ire for some grave indiscretion.

4. An oppossition bloc who is getting louder by the day---where stinging remarks is breakfast stuff.

5. A Church disenchanted.

6. People marching like ants in the streets of Manila, specifically along EDSA.

7. Backpedalling or loyalty-shifting cabinet members.

8. A change of face by the military, at least the higher ups.

9. And finally, a central political figure that can easily replace the President when called upon.

As we speak now, we are feeling that familiar feeling again where something is on the brink of happenstance, where something must happen within days and if such would not happen accordingly, then it would not happen at all.

If President Gloria Macpagal Arroyo could withstand this windstorm that bedevils her administration like no other, where she remains in power for the rest of July, then most probably she would stay in power until her terms expires. Probably, the opposition movement would die down for lack of vigor and perseverance. For a "people power" revolution to succeed, conviction of the heart and strength of protest is primordial and conditions precedent. This happens only when people would stay in the streets for days and days to go, and even in the face of hunger and physical discomfiture, nobody gives in. That's when the people's voice becomes God's voice. Vox populi, vox dei.

At these heavy hours, we watch a brimming revolution upstarting but what's cooking is something not yet smoldering. If the Church would eventually support GMA's ouster, and if the military backs out of her wings then, then we may see yet another government toppled by the "street parliament" that we Filipinos are so well known for all over the world, at times notoriously.

And remember, we are yet to see an alternative central figure that can unite the opposition. One that is enigmatic enough and likeable enough that can be acceptable to all sectors. Susan Roces may be that one person but not all agree. Noli de Castro should be a shoo-in in a constitutional turnover of power but street protesters often barks at his being just another GMA-clone. Meaning the same status quo will remain in a De Castro administration.

Altogether, I am not being a doomsday prophet. I in fact pray that the Lord Almighty above will continue to guide the Filipinos in these dangerous hours. God bless the Philippines!!!

Democracy: Is It Consolidating In Middle East?

2005-06-20T15:10:00.000+08:00

Everything happened too fast like a phantasm. Or like a mirage. Just a year ago, Lebanon was still under the strapping hands of Syria as Beirut became one huge military headquarter for Syrian forces who toddles along the night streets of Beirut in pointed tanks and camouflaged vehicles, looking for enemies of the state. At many points in the past, Lebanon became a country where its own people became the “enemies of the state” while Syrian intruders became the hand that feeds. The Syrian forces have stayed for far too long.

But on Sunday, everything had changed. Saad Hariri, the son of assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and other anti-Syrian politicians wrestled control over the governance of Lebanon in a four-stage elections that culminated in Sunday’s balloting. From subjugation to complete control---this is the Cinderella story of Lebanon that swirled before the eyes of the world like a whirlwind, because it happened too fast. This time, too fast is good and acceptable.

How time passes. With the successful holding of the elections in Beirut, most Lebanese could only hope that from this moment on, everything will be fair and sunny in a country that had endured more than a decade of civil war that pitted mortally the northern dwelling Christians as against the southern residing Muslims as well as the over-extended intrusions by the Syrian military into its territory. While President George Bush is still struggling to fine-tune his “transplantation” of democracy in Iraq (that is, by way of military force), the Lebanese proved that democracy can still be had in Middle East through the usual and more fitting peaceful processes (that is, by election).

The Science and Exponential Theories Of Wiretapping

2005-06-15T13:35:00.000+08:00

Why do men usually seek to peek? Especially when the peeping is uncalled for. It seems to me that the more insidious and stained with malice a fact becomes, the more men wants to find out about it, or read and ponder upon it. And so it becomes moot and academic to us that wiretapping is such a reality nowadays particularly in the seedy world of dirty politics and the military.

In decades old, those who need to know the secrets of others went for other rigid medium like sending someone like Mata Hari, a lady dancer, deep into enemy territory just in order for salient information be had and forcefully taken. Decades ago, chief intelligence networks like KGB and CIA even went to “transplanting” individuals just in order to spy on other men’s secret knowledge or hidden facts, where they slipped in into enemy country their own citizen at a very young age and train him to act, speak and behave like an enemy so that one day when he grows up, he can easily pretend and pose like an enemy without any risk of detection. In those days, spymasters even had to wait the passing of so many years just so that they can gather much needed information.

But now, with technology growing by leap and bounds, all it will take for anyone to peep into somebody else’s world is money to buy available hi-technology equipment that could gather information by just merely the push of the button. The one being used by ISAFP, as admitted by some of its former men to NEWSBREAK, could intercept 500 cellphones all at the same time. Of course officially ISAFP would deny this for they say; wiretapping is not their business. But that’s all crap.

But of course, the military is into this peeking and sneaking game whether they admit it or not. Only now, the usual subjects of their wiretapping operations---like drug dealers, kidnappers, bank robbers and terrorists---are already aware that they are being wiretapped even when they are using cellphones. Ordinarily, if one were to be careful, he or she would usually say: “Use the cellphones baka na-bugged and telephone lines.” Now, they’d be too careful using even their cellphones for malicious conversations. Criminals can become too careful now for police detection.

But is it possible for the military to sneak on its own commander-in-chief? This ain’t such a hard question to answer and having read too much Tom Clancy and Frederick Forsythe in the past tells me that in the game called spying, there is no such thing as rules or ethics. There is no sacred cow here. Not even the President of the Republic of the Philippines. It’s a wild world baby!

This wiretapping controversy tells us one thing. The military may be too politicized than we had thought before. It may even be acting too independently that even the President, they had to spy and see if they should or should not intervene into the governance of our country. Are we close to becoming a Myanmar or Pakistan where the military acted on its own and took rein of governance from civilian hands?

This Asking Game

2005-06-10T13:59:00.000+08:00

Once I was strolling along Warmstone, as I often do, and soon I was leisurely trapped into “this asking game” which by the way got me quite excited and pumped up. It’s fun and interesting. And so Bing prepared for me five (5) questions that I should elaborate upon and aside from being so excited about answering it, it got me a little bit anxious. But anyway, here is “this asking game” and I hope you’ll like to get into it.

1. Expound on being a Y.B. Masdal.

“Y” is for Yusop and “B” is for Bandaying which respectively are my first name and middle name. When I was a highscool student in Ateneo de Zamboanga, I was such a great fan of great writers like T.S. Elliot and O. Henry. I have surmised that perhaps someday I could become a great writer myself and use a sharp semi-pseudonym with crafty initials in it, that is, like “Y.B. Masdal”.

2. What prompted you to have “Where Now is the Citizen on Mars?” as blog title?

Quite frankly, the title “Where Now Is The Citizen on Mars?” just came up to me when the moment arrived that I was to name my new socio-political blog. I could not say that I chose that title as a form of surrealistic expression or as a way of sounding cool and smart, because I would be lying in that case. I used to call this blog of mine as “A Citizen on Mars” before I launched it in the web. It was like magic. I was racking my head for several possible titles and I was thinking hard until something lit in my head like a lightbulb and voila! the phrase “Where Now Is The Citizen On Mars? just popped up and I immediately used it without any further hesitation. My screen name “Major Tom” just came up later on as an offshoot of the “Mars” thing and also because I am a great fan of David Bowie and he sang about “Major Tom” in the song with the same title, who was “..floating in the most peculiar way…and sitting on a tin can” and was mostly about some spaceman floating beyond the moon and was looking towards the earth below and observing. As a blogger, I felt that all of us bloggers are all similar to an astronaut hovering above earth’s spaces and observing about all the things that happens there and about all the things that are not happening and then we write about these things.

3. What political issue stimulated your mind the most?

I could not pinpoint exactly at one subject or issue but I guess problems on graft and corruption always stimulates my mind. I have a particular dislike on those who are dishonest in the government service.

4. Who is Major Tom 10 years from now?

I’d like to believe that ten years from now, Major Tom has written a very interesting book that many readers read and liked, including those in faraway lands.

5. If you are an RP diplomat to Iraq, how will you deal with complaints on working condition and hours that violated the OFWs’ contracts?

My immediate actions would be to start exploratory talks and initiate meetings with all known employers of our OFWs in Iraq and discuss head-on the reported labor violations that they have supposedly committed. At the same time, I would put into motion a team that would gather verifiable informations and evidences that could prove the violations of those employers. If by these initial actions the problems would persist, I would consider sending back affected OFWs home before the problems get worst. I should recognize that contract violations in working hours may endanger the lives of some of our OFWs where some of them may be force to work on a time and condition where the risk on their limbs and lives may be greater than what is normal.

Here are The Official Interview Game Rules:

If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying "interview me."

I will respond by asking you five questions - each person’s will be different.

You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.

You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.

When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions. If you don’t have a blog, I will still ask you 5 unique questions and you can post your answers here.

What’s Southcom Got To Do With It?

2005-06-02T18:34:00.000+08:00

I could not help but write something about what’s happening here in our city---this city of fame and notoriety called Zamboanga. In our town today is House Committee on Defense Representative Roilo Golez along with other house member House Minority Floor Leader Francis Escudero and the ever-affable Zambonga Representative Erbie Fabian. Southern Command Chief Lt. Gen. Alberto Braganza and a horde of high-ranking military officials have been invited also to shed light on the on the dire issues attending.

FYI---President Gloria Macpagal-Arroyo, in supplement to an earlier order to transfer the center of Region IX to Pagadian City---a move which effectively meant the relocation of all government regional head offices from this city to Pagadian---had recently instructed Southern Command officials to pack up their bags and head up north, also to Pagadian City. Soon, the Southern Command, the strongest and biggest military infrastructure here in Mindanao will call Pagadian its home instead of Zamboanga.

Apparently, local residents here headed by no less than Mayor Celso Lobregat himself pushed the panic button and starkly protested this order by President Arroyo to take Southcom away from this city, which for years and years before have served as a bastion of military power that had somehow stave away grave threats and danger to this particular peninsula, a perennial hotspot and troublesome area that includes the nearby island of Basilan and the ever problematic Sulu Province just further down south. Zamboanga residents are up in arms and they have just been to the streets this afternoon to send the clearest message to the President that what she had done was clearly such a bad thing to do and obviously inconsiderate.

We all know how the Basilan and Sulu areas are such notoriously volatile regions, like a volcano always threatening to explode, where terrorists and bandits roam there like they own the streets as well as the mountains. The transfer of Southcom from Zamboanga City to Pagadian City would further embolden these terrorists and bandits to wreak more havoc in a place already scarred by a past so bloody and gory.

So many uncertainties and questions have risen from this unexpected and highly surprising move by the President. Her cohorts reasoned out that relocating the major headquarters of the military here in Mindanao to another city would not really affect the strength of forces assigned and situated here. But they do not get the point, Southcom is more than the actual foot soldiers on the ground protecting this very fragile region, or the definite number of tanks and helicopters that are parked and warehoused here. It actually serves as a psychological military strength here that had effectively controlled danger and harm brought about by terrorists in the past. Without it, troubles in Basilan and Sulu may have been doubly gruesome.

I do not know if this house inquiry could bring the result desired by Zamboanga residents but what I see here is more than the things we see on the outer realms of the issue. You see, Zamboanga City was some place where the President lost to FPJ by an embarrassing landslide and Pagadian City was a part of the Zamboanga del Sur juggernaut that had helped her win the election, winning there with relatively high margins. I am not accusing her anything as of this moment but if my fears and intuitions are true, she may have just been guilty of jeopardizing regional security, as well as national security by fiddling with Southcom and the lives of hundreds of thousands of residents merely on the basis of political revenge or political patronization, the signs and symptoms of old, traditional and stinking culture of politics. It’s a cruel and shameless way of parading how politics in these part of the world works. She ain’t different afterall. She’s just the same animal.

See related news articles and stories here:
1. The Manila Times - House probe into Southcom transfer to start May 22.
2. Philippine Daily Inquirer - AFP team to study transfer of Southcom to Pagadian.

The Filipino Conscience

2005-05-21T13:35:00.000+08:00

The Philippine Daily Inquirer lauded it as “one inspiring story” and I fully acquiesced to this observation. Three Filipino seamen---namely Jonathan Sanchez, Jimmy Piamonte, and Florencio Tolentino---and another ship worker were rewarded yesterday for having had their hearts and mind in the proper places at just about the time they are needed most.

Read the Entire Story.

The United States government rewarded sizable amount of money to the persons mentioned above for having “squealed” on their ship’s unscrupulous act of dumping waste material into the Pacific Ocean. Their testimony was apparently crucial to the victorious prosecution of their former employer for violating U.S. and international environmental laws. A U.S court fined the DST Shipping Company a million dollars for the malice they have done to our oceans and also, the ship captain and some other officers were left with no other option but to plead guilty for their indiscretions.

Each “whistle blower” got four million pesos except for the ship cook who only got a third of the amount for his additional testimony on the case mentioned above. According to Joseph Mussomeli, the U.S. charge d' affaires here in the Philippines, the reward given were sufficient enough to stifle the consequential difficulties of the said seamen to seek re-employment especially in the same industry. Their “turning against their boss” might just be a stigma that would be stuck with them tightly from now on and no ship owner, especially those with malevolent schemes similar to their former employer, would be wont to take them in as ship workers. No matter, their brave and courageous acts could just be their badges of honor that could overcome any difficulties that they may encounter in their future pursuits. They may enter instead other industries and I am pretty certain that their marked credibility is just but the exact virtues that some of our employers are looking for. Or they may enter the government service for surely their honesty is a welcome respite to an organization full of snakes and thieves.

What Jonathan Sanchez, Jimmy Piamonte, and Florencio Tolentino accomplished is a reflection of how we can still rely on “the Filipino conscience”, where we could still believe that in these days of desperation, we Filipinos could still be seen as a people not only industrious and hardworking but also honest and forthright. For this alone the three Filipinos should be deemed heroes to our nation and purveyors of the “The Filipino Conscience”.

What I see also is a case study for possible legislation in our shores. You see, we must adopt and incorporate the good things that have been brought about by this “whistle-blowing” where an insidious act was brought to the attention of the authorities by entities close or connected with the malicious act. We can surely use a “Whistle Blowers Act” where we can apportion sufficient amount of money as rewards to persons who are willing to come out in the open and expose the malpractices that have been done in the government, according to their first-hand knowledge. With this reward system, many may just be prodded to “squeal” on their bosses’ or co-workers for their thieveries and excessiveness. In this manner, the fight against graft and corruption in our government may find some success albeit just fairly.

What's Your Kinda E-VAT?

2005-05-17T11:58:00.000+08:00

The new E-VAT scheme has finally slithered through the Congress amidst a dramatic battle of the filibusters, complete with a walkout and heated exchange of spiteful words that for once there, you’d think we are watching the Taiwanese parliament, where fisticuffs among lawmakers are but a daily thing. So what version got through? Reports declared that the bicameral version was the one that got away, meaning to say, the E-VAT rate will remain at 10% but the taxable subjects---goods, services and what-nots---would expand significantly to include new items such as electricity and petroleum products. You’d think that the passed EVAT law is the less evil version among all versions but I think it is still the same animal clothed in lamb’s skin; it would still be a bringer of additional burden and would still propel the usual hardships any tax legislation often brings. Don’t be misled. Nobody should look and feel heroes here by false impressions.

Minority Floor Leader Congressman Escudero bowed to disembowel the newly passed EVAT Law by hurling it all the way to the Supreme Court with complaints that it did not fulfill the constitutional requirements of “proper emanation” . You see, all tax laws must be initiated by the Lower House and Escudero contended that the passed version was one that was engineered and designed by the Senate alone---which I think is completely false. The “emanation” requirements should have already been fulfilled since any tax law should only be started and begun in the Lower House and nothing prohibits the Senate or any bicameral committee to filibuster upon it and tinker with it, just like in any other bills. His Supreme Court gambit may not work this time.

Congressman Escudero should instead question the new EVAT Law clause that reportedly allows President Macapagal-Arroyo to increase the rate to 12% without any Congressional approval. Now, this one is really for the books and entirely queer and unprecedented. In Taxation Laws, there is what we know as allowed prerogative by the president to increase and decrease tariff rates, a sort of an emergency power, where the President of the land would be allowed to take necessary measures, in the form of timely adjustments in tariff rates of certain imports, without the usual lengthy and tedious proceeding of lawmaking. And so, in some particular instances, the President could allow tax exemptions of certain imports of a big investor as an incentive without asking prior acquiescence from our lawmakers. Or in some instance, the president could anytime adjust the tariff rates of certain products anytime he or she desires, in response to the global international situation. Before GATT and WTO, countries tend to protect their markets by imposing high entry tariff rates without warning or hints. When these things happened before, our country could retaliate immediately by giving the President “emergency taxation powers” by also increasing the tariffs rates of products coming from “hostile” merchandising countries, without any delay. So this is really the cause or justification why in some manner, the President before was allowed to tinker and adjust tariff rates in order to respond to emergency situations or urgent necessity to accommodate huge investors. This is the “one exception” and the single instance where the taxation is not in the hands of Congress, a sort of an anomaly to the rule on delegation of taxing powers, which should only be exercised by Congress.

But now, by some queer circumstance, the President is allowed to increase the EVAT rate without Congressional permission. This is clearly not sound and in violation of our fundamental precepts on separation of powers and constitutional mandate. The taxing power should not in any way be in the hands of the Executive Branch of our government for this may give rise to abuse, oppressiveness and callousness.

The debacle on the EVAT Law may not die down soon and may drag towards a long and winding road, and into the august halls of the Supreme Court.

A Minor Soliloquy

2005-05-09T12:48:00.000+08:00

It has been a while since I last posted an entry on Where Now Is The Citizen On Mars? and being such a inexhaustible blogger that I have been in the past months, I wasn’t used to these kind of laidback situation. But I have to get used to these infrequencies at least for now and hope that I can get everything ironed out in the coming days and my normal blogging days may soon be back. And so then, don’t get me wrong. I ain’t quitting finally. I am just slowing down due to some busy schedules with my other life’s concerns.

And so what had happened in the past two weeks…Maybe a lot, maybe not as much. Yesterday, the momentous First Blogging Summit was all over the TV and I had goosebumps thinking that my fellow bloggers are actually taking one giant step forward with this event and as I saw it on a number of TV footages, the event was undeniably a grand success. Way too go then and kudos to those who have organized it; the way it was presented, you could feel that seasoned individuals were behind it. I saw JJ Disini and Yugatech speaking in front of TV camera and they were as eloquent as they were in their blog spaces.

Mother’s Day came yesterday and so I had to greet all the mothers in the world including my mother, Darwisa Masdal, one who has been as nurturing as any mother on earth could be and I couldn’t ask for more. Someday, my daughter Evette Darwisa may be a mother herself, and my only daughter among a brood of four, would surely be as nurturing as her grandma, or as her mom, Evelyn who aside from being the best mother for my kids, has also been such a great wall for me as a wife. I would like also to greet Teacher Sol for this occasion and I know, how lovely a mother she is and how her kids deserved her like the world. And then Bambit, Sam’s other half—I greet her also. Shalimar, the Filipina blogger from Europe may not still be a mother herself but I know she’ll be a fine one day.

In the political front, there were a lot of noises about jueteng, that numbers game that Filipinos seem to have a long and ardous love affair with. Like Romeo and Juliet, jueteng is one thing that says, “..till death”. Shall we legalize it? Many have been asking this question now that we are embroiled again in this debate that had already brought down one administration. Will it bring down GMA also? It remains to be seen.

If it were up to me, jueteng should be legalized in order that money that has been going to gambling lords, which run in the billions, would be partaken instead by the government. Imagine if these billions of pesos would be added to our treasuries, our fiscal deficit problems would be a thing of the past. Well, I know gambling is never such a virtuous deed and I do not encourage it and I do not practice it also. But jueteng poses a queer problem where in order to lick it we have to ride on with it first. There is just no way for us now to eradicate this menace and all we could do is to regulate it first. In that manner, regulation can tone down the abuses and excessiveness of this old town habit and at the same time, like hitting two birds with a stone, our treasury will get a little fatter. This numbers game is such a legend that many things have emanated from it. I believe that no President has been immune from it. I mean, every President may benefit from it whether they like it or not. It is not only Erap that fell into this trap. The money is there for the taking and it’s hard to turn down, a kind of a Godfather proposition, “It is an offer you could not refuse”. I bet presidential candidates have been spending such huge amount of money in past elections thinking that jueteng will be there to save their day when finally they take their seat. For this reason alone, jueteng should be in the hands of the government in order that only individuals without grand monetary schemes would run for the highest position.

The Middle Class: The Key to Our Nation’s Progress

2005-05-09T11:41:00.000+08:00

There were many talks about the middle class before---who are they and where are they found. In the Philippine settings, identifying this sector of our society is never an easy task for this idiom, which has found its root in western economic theories, does not easily apply to our own principalities.

Who are the members of our middle class? Where are they? How can we identify them?

Generally, the determining factor in ascertaining the middle level of our society is primarily the earning capacity of a certain group of people and secondarily their social mindset. In a society like us, where for many centuries we were in virtual serfdom, we are mainly a nation of the rich on one side and the rest of the poor in the other. There is nothing much in between. We had at many times in the past a classless society.

We must only remember that even as we speak and while we kept again and again to break away from this stranglehold of unfair distribution of wealth in our nation, we have not effectively evolved from the virtual serfdom society that we have inherited from our Spanish colonizers of many centuries ago and if there were changes, they came in stifling trickles. We tried our best to escape this ugly past by adopting two versions of comprehensive land reform programs, one during the Marcs years and one in the freedom government of President Corazon Aquino, yet we are still presently hounded by the sad state of gregarious amount of land in the hands of a meager few.

I remember too well the lasting images that I have seen in the not too distant movie “Far and Away” which featured Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as protagonists and chronicles in a fictitious manner the onset of emigrants in a time of the birth of a nation, the land of milk and honey, America. Irish settlers and some other nationalities, were lined up in a multitude by the authorities with their horses and cavalcades readying themselves in a mad rush towards a wide open plains to which each family unit was given a white flag to identify the territory they have gotten for themselves. As they rush along towards more favorable plains, the very site that they could plunge their flags to the soft ground would immediately be theirs and theirs alone for eternity as long as they hold on to it and nobody, not even the State could take it away from them. The actors who took part in the rushing multitude of men, women and children perhaps captured so well the elation and joy of many American settlers who became part of such exercise, when as each flag was trusted to the ground, tears would roll down from their eyes and relief was all too apparent on their faces. The movie made me appreciate all the more the power of land and its role as the sustainer of life. What I saw in the movie was perhaps the most singular reason to the astounding progress that America has attained even up to the present, especially in the 20th century.

The government in America of past centuries had made sure that each men and women of their society became able to produce by themselves and become contributors to their young nation’s productivity. In short, the ordinary man was empowered with an economic capacity that was best brought for by the ownership of land. Thereon, everyone was capacitated to etched their own living and with money in their pockets, they had become voracious buyers that for every garment and T-Model Ford vehicles manufactured in Industrial Age America, a horde of middle class have the money to consume them. When there are many potential buyers who waits in the by side, bloating with consumer power, any product or material put on sale will surely find their own buyers and thereon, more and more factories would rise from the ground to produce more and more products with waiting consumers ready to pounce and more and more hands are hired to man these rising industries. The end effect of this would be more and more money in the hands of a growing middle class, consuming perniciously the produce of the nation’s productivity and thereon sustaining the economic cycle.

In the 1990’s, the economic world were parading the term “consumer power” and it is consumer power of the population that becomes one of the primary motivations for any foreign investor that aims to put money in any developing nation. We have seen the rise of new tiger economies and the most recent among them are Malaysia and Thailand. One of the veritable characteristic of their economies was a better than fair consumer appetite. It is mainly an illusion or perhaps a passing exception to think that multinational companies are putting shop in our shores just because they just want to manufacture products aimed at other markets. They come thinking partly that whatever they produce, the local market is mature enough to help consume them. This is the main reason for China’s economic juggernaut. American companies started trooping to the star of the orient as early as the late 80’s initially because they were staring at one billion possible drinkers of softdrinks and one billion eaters of burgers and one billion possible drivers of Chevrolets. Cheap and skilled labor in that territory of course remains a great come-on for companies who aims to save on overhead costs. A bludgeoning local consumer made it easier for many multinationals to decide on locating their businesses in China.

How we always go back to that most basic economic law of supply and demand even in a world of gargantuan complications. As the demand grows, supply rises in collateral amount and still remains that when supply overlaps demand, prices would certainly go down. Increase in the unit of supply certainly generates the expectation that more economic activity is done and when economic activity is humming with enough fervor, more labor is needed and employment statistics improved greatly. Aside from this, resources are much more sought after, especially raw materials one gets from low-end sectors like farmers and sea traders and therefore the GDP ticks at a higher scale.

We must now see more closely at the “demand factor”, for in my view, demand is the key to the upswings in the supply and demand curve. We must create demand if need be and every economic manager should be looking at this x-factor in the equation of things. I have no professional training in economics except for a couple of economics subjects that I was forced-fed in college. My only wish is that creating demand is unlike creating a bridge when there is no river or lake. (I remember that joke about a politician who had promised his constituents in an election campaign that he would build a bridge in their locality while addressing a crowd. When someone in the crowd blurted out that there was no river in their place, the politician then declared rather pompously that in that case, he will build a river.) What I mean is that, does it take a genius to find out the way to finding demand blissfulness?

My view on the matter of supply and demand is more of that of a layman’s and yet I believe that the ordinary eye can at certain point see some complicated perspectives with a clearer vista.

This is where my soliloquy on the middle class comes in. We must keep on building and rebuilding our middle class which should compose every man and woman who puts his or her hand in labor, as apart from the excessively rich who doesn’t need to sweat anymore to make their life uplifted and from the extremely poor who at most times do not toil anymore for lack of capital or capacity to make a living. This is the Philippine middle class and almost every one of us belongs to this class—the farmer and the fishermen, the lawyer and doctors, the middle politicians, the tricycle drivers, teachers and government workers, the sellers of food in the market and of everyday gadgets in city sidewalks, the restaurateurs and those who are paid to act as clowns in many children’s’ parties, the cotton candy maker, the cigarette peddlers, the media men in some local news station, the cook and the chef, the athlete who are paid a measly allowance by the state, the radio announcer, the factory workers, the planters of camotes and cassavas, the harvesters of coconuts and the struggling artist. You name it and we got it.

We need to find a way on how to harness the potential power of the middle class. Like water rushing from a cliff, the hidden energy is just there to be discovered.

The most practical mode of developing the consumer power of the middle class is by encouraging some growth in their income and benefits. This may make our capitalists and our economic planners squirm even while they sleep yet there is no better alternative to this. It is one of those challenges that connote some sacrifices and many hardships especially in the initial stages. Our economic managers would look at this view with great disfavor since raising minimum wage so sharply would make us less competitive with our other Asian neighbors in attracting foreign investments. As a countermeasure to this apprehension, I suggest that the key towards higher take home pays of the labor sector is not by legislating a wage increase all too often (which would scare away foreign capital) but by enacting or initiating a selective and pro-active compensation scheme for the private sector where the increases would come by way of bonuses and supplemental benefits like for example such items as productivity pay and performance bonuses. The government could offer tax rebates and credits to companies who adhere to the payments of particular supplemental wages and afford them major discounts in importing duties and such other similar rewards. In this manner, the minimum wage is not disturb by sharp increases and only companies whose net incomes are in the upswing are more inclined to raise the level of income of their workers. So in lieu of a legislated wage increase, the state could enact a pro-active scheme where the pay of the workers is supplemented not by direct wage increases but by an assortment of benefits. Like for example, a company with substantial financial success could offer their workers benefits like monthly supply of a sack of rice or scholarships for the workers’ dependents. This manner of compensation, although not in terms of wage increases, would certainly alleviate the plight of our workers and increases their buying capacity.

The business world needs buyers and we can develop many more aggressive buyers through our laborers, the soul of the middle class. This is the ideal cycle of a healthy economy and not a cycle where the fruits of a nation’s economic upswing are stagnated in the hands of the few who stashes profits into some Swiss bank account. As a result, the profits gained do not redound to more resources poured into the economy by way of generated investments and higher benefits for labor. Earnings should be rolled over by putting them back into the capital market and one of the capital expenses are labor expenses.

In corporate and financial laws, companies are prohibited from retaining more than enough earnings in order to evade the circumstances where companies hide their true earning numbers by secluding a great portion of their income as retained earnings for research or development. Retaining too much earnings is considered in fraud of stockholders as well as of creditors. In the same breath, although not as prohibited, if many capitalists retain their private earnings by not distributing them back into the economy and instead hide them away in some foreign bank accounts, this is tantamount to economic sabotage where they could be acting as if they are leeches just out there to fattened themselves and run away when they have siphoned already more than enough blood. This is like a hit-and run in broad daylight.

When any growth in economy does not redound to a more uplifted living standard for our laborers, it becomes meaningless in the general scheme of things but is merely appreciated by the few who have capital in their hands.

Another mode of harnessing the consuming potential of the middle class is by a government-led widespread capacitating program by penetrating the root bases of our society—the rural dwellers and the urban poor—and instructing them on various livelihood activities. This is actually being done by the state even as we speak through the Cooperative Development Authority (CDA) and through many other agencies, at many times in coordination with NGOs and international organizations like the World Bank and JAICA. This particular effort by the state should need to be more energized and spread out.

In any sense, we must invoke a fairer social justice in the distribution of our nation’s wealth in order that we reach the next level of industrialization. An economy without a powerful middle class would lack the instigating factors that could generate more and more business activity and growth is slow if not in a stand still. Our capitalists should begin to trust our economy and not keep on testing the water where they only shell out their money when they have ultimate certainty of return.

The cycle that we see the most fair is as simple as this: when the laborers and many other members of our middle class begin to have more than sufficient income, they begin to buy more cigarettes and beer and electronic appliances and toys and fancy garments and would begin to eat more in fastfood centers So we ask, isn’t it the capitalists themselves who will reap the fruits of a middle class with a vast consumer power? The answer is of course a resounding yes.

BIR Is Acting Like It's In A Movie.

2005-04-29T15:37:00.000+08:00

Suddenly we have Elliot Nesses in our midst. I know this topic on tax evaders is a little bit a thing of the past but I just couldn’t help but extricate the very issue away from the huge confusion emanating from the extensive media coverage it had garnered. Lately, BIR Commissioner Guillermo Parayno Jr., has been in the headlines parading a number of tax-evasion charges against moviestars and in an instant, the government’s newfound zest to pursue tax cheats has gained enormous ground, and the whole scenario paints a lovelier picture of our ministrants in Malacanang. Suddenly, the BIR is home to many Elliot Ness hunting down the Al Capones in our midst instead of mansion-entrenched and BMW-driving tax collectors. And mind you, they have become so brave like gallant knights that it is not only moviestars that they are after, but also they’re also breathing down the throat of Eddie Velarde and Cardinal Gaudencio. Tax cheaters, here they come. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Now, I must be blinking and seeing things. Now suddenly they are after moviestars and evangelists. Why in the world the BIR should be feeling all too proud going after movie stars and evangelists, personalities that has the affectations of the masses? You know, Richard Gomez and Brother Eddie Villanueva commands the respect and admiration of many and this move by the BIR may backfire and may even show the government in such a bad light. I am not favoring these celebrities to cheat on our treasuries but I just thought that BIR should go after the bigger fishes. The ones that matter. Its in the big business sector where there is a massive bleeding of our tax collectibles and if BIR could go to the media and name just one from this sector, say an owner of a food chain or a mall retailer, then I guess they’d be real heroes and can parade before us like they are true Elliot Nesses.

But right now, they seem to appear cowardly merely going after those who cannot really bite back. Instead of being serious, BIR appear just to be playing safe. They seem to be just acting to appear serious in their work. Well, welcome to showbiz guys.

I Think We All Should Fasten Our Seatbelts

2005-04-26T16:16:00.000+08:00

The last thing I aimed to be seen here is a doomsayer, but for this time, I am afraid a have no choice but to sound like one. The news these days is just filled with horrible things, one after another, like we never had enough of them.

Congress is about to raise the taxes we all pay. Oil prices are steadily on the rise. Crimes thrive in our streets like never before. And as if these horrible things weren't enough, NAPOCOR had just received a go ahead from the Energy Regulatory Commission to increase its per kilowatt pricing, sending our bills further into the ceilings.

It is a double entendre of economic hell, rising oil prices and rising energy rates are just about the last things our economy need. With this rare but vicious combination, there is no more avoiding how the prices of basic commodities would soon burden our pockets all the more in the coming days. As if we had not gone through enough hell already. I think we all should fasten our seatbelts.

NAPOCOR has such the cruelest sense of timing that they could swallow the fact of further burdening the public when now is the time when we are facing the steepest rise in oil prices ever and when E-VAT is set to “expand” all the more. In fact, NAPOCOR has a "blackmail thing" going on. If the rates are not raised soon enough, the country is bound to step backward into the dark ages once more, just like in the early part of the 1990's. NAPOCOR executives are using as a justification of turning NAPOCOR into a more adorable enterprise to investors, in its quest for privatization but they seem to be hiding the fact so well that without immediate additional revenues, it is bound to go kaput by being forced to default on its obligations. In a year, NAPOCOR is said to be paying 60 Billion pesos in interest alone.

Most of these debts it had incurred emanated from the years when then President Fidel V. Ramos wielded his "emergency powers" to contract luxurious “energy contracts” in order to solve the dire power crisis then. What NAPOCOR did since then, is to let such debts to bloat steadily with interest and even went on subsidizing power rates, a sort of "cosmetic treatment" in order to show that the government is just doing fine and electricity rate is low, when the “real rates’ was in fact a little higher. I have no problem with subsidies but when it comes with dire consequences, like the steep and sudden rate increase that we are about to experience in the coming days, it's not worth taking. What NAPOCOR did was hiding the"true cost" of electricity for a long time, and when it could not "hide" anymore, it has to go now to the public and complain, asking for steep adjustments with pointed guns on our head or else....or else "dark ages" would descend upon us faster than we can say "Pizza!". Blackmailing has never been done as expertly as this way before.

Sound management should have led NAPOCOR executives in the past to amortize and spread the cost of these debts over a long period of time, like for example over a twenty-year period. In this manner, the burden may not be as high each year and as suddenly taxing.

I think NAPOCOR executives should all be hailed to congress for a legislative inquiry and made to explain why heads shouldn't roll for mismanagement.

Delicious As Sin

2005-04-26T16:14:00.000+08:00

No, I haven’t seen the movie yet but having had a short glimpse of it through a trailer (courtesy of the Soundtrack Channel on cable television) I deem it already as a movie worth standing by in over-extended lines at the malls.

Catching the end-parts of the movie trailer, I felt immediately blown away by the sharpness of the renditions on the screen and it felt so much like a movie in my mind, one that I have been waiting for a very long, long time and now it finally came.

"Sin City" is shot and filmed using the black-and-white format, the way old movies were made and although this is not unprecedented, we could not help but notice it. When "Schindler's List" was done in this manner some years ago, the world virtually stood up in great anticipation and felt enormous awe after watching it. And so now I noticed how "Sin City" is similarly stunning in its visual virtues and the manner and form it decided to appear is thought-provoking to say the least. For a while there, while watching a passing glimpse of the movie preview, I thought for once that I was watching a re-issue of "Casablanca", one that have been more sharply re-editted. But instead, I was watching the image of Bruce Willis as he stood in the middle of a stormy weather while on another scene Rosario Dawson was trying to grab Clive Owens, for a hug of course. Both moments in the movie may seem fleeting, but the way it was shot was surprisingly fresh and new.

This movie is based entirely on the comic book with the same title written by Frank Miller many years ago, the superstar comic-book writer-novelist who had gained instant fame by romanticizing and re-inventing Batman in the very successful work "The Dark Knight Returns". Miller wasn't such a sell-out that when Hollywood came knocking on his door, he refused to allow a movie rehashing of "Sin City". Miller says of Hollywood, "And I know what they do. They turn everything into a bromide with a happy ending."

And then came maverick filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Once Upon A Time In Mexico) and Frank Miller found himself haunted day in and day out. Rodriguez even had to stalk him into the bars and saloons he frequented each night and begged virtually on bended knees. Robert Rodriguez promised to make a Frank Miller's "Sin City" and not Robert Rodriguez’s "Sin City" and aside from that, Miller will be on board as a co-director. Somewhere, Robert Rodriguez violated some guidelines of the Directors' Guild of America by taking in Miller as a co-director, but Rodriguez couldn't care less and resigned from the guild in a jiffy. That's how Robert Rodriguez wanted this film so much. He had to make heavens and earth meet.

As a comic-book "Sin City" was instantly popular when it was first released, becoming that rare specie of cult-favorite that had sold in the millions. It is one lurid tale of a schizoprenic goon out on a revenge binge after he woke up one morning with a hooker on his side. Pretty horrifying and violent of a theme, but violence may just find salvation in the hands of Rodriguez. And in Frank Miller's too.

It is a movie in a comic-book format or a comic book in a movie format. However which way it is a radical film in the simplest of terms. "Sin City" is one movie I that thought was so very difficult to film before but now, it had been done.

The Hundred Years Trouble

2005-04-23T16:13:00.000+08:00

In college, I was so fascinated by a historical event that happened in Europe some centuries ago and it was a highly protracted war between England and France that was then dubbed as “The Hundred Years War”. I know that there had been many more wars in history, both known and unknown that lasted for more periods but the “hundred years war” made me rethink the passion and capacity of men to make war even in the old ages.

Lately, one trouble made me rethink again how some men or women for that matter, have that unusual rapacity to make trouble as if the very moment that they had breathe this mortal air, they were already born into the culture of trouble, angst, envy and conflict.

In JOHNPAULACLAN’s blog, someone misused my pseudonym and commented in its tagboard with nasty expressions. And to make matters worst, JP seem to have believe them just as easily, without further verification. Things like this can easily be done and faked. Anyone can just use a name, an invented one or that of someone else’s name. For example, you only need elementary computer knowledge in order to comment in any blog site using the name of other bloggers. The only way we can detect on who really made those comments is by checking out the I.P. address that goes with the comments, and then verifying with the Internet provider company about the telephone line where the IP address point to. But then, if someone commented by using a computer from an internet café, there is just no way of tracing the person so easily because a lot of people go in and out of cafes all the time.

Why in the world would I say something nasty about JP, one who I have considered as a true friend not only in the blogosphere but also in the real world. I treated him like a brother in faith, for I know he is religious. But now I know that he easily believes in rumors.

Some bloggers hate me JP only because I have contradicted their views, and some of them, not many, could not take contradicting opinion so well. And there were some who treated me as enemies because I have protested their lambasting of catholicism and religion in general.

You should not believe anyone misusing the name MAJOR TOM, pretending in order to create havoc and dissension. I am always nice and respectful when I comment. Everyone should be notified that if a MAJOR TOM is commenting in your site and its NASTY and BASTOS, it couldn’t be me.

You know, I feel flattered that despite of me being just new, many tried to bring me down. I juts don’t know why. I don’t know exactly the number of those who “hate” or “envy” me. But I am only sure about one person and most of you know this blogger. Some of us just could not accept that others might be smarter than us.

Ugly things happen. If these things continue to happen, I may just have to close down shop so please bear with the inconvenience. Am I responsible for my readers? Well, if my readers demand that I’ll stay, then I’ll stay. But I’ll try my best to stay as long as I can.

These things just humor me at times that I could just laugh inside knowing na talagang inngit lang ang mga naninira sa akin. They must have lost some of their self-respect.

Could Be The Shortest Significant Papacy

2005-04-20T11:28:00.000+08:00

Joseph Ratzinger had a lock on the papacy like a shoe to Cinderella’s feet and the only one that were surprised about his ascendancy to the papacy were the ones who did not see the sign of the times, or just being blind to them. Well, a mouse trapped in the Galapagos Island would have been surprised as well.

The problem with Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, is not being a surprised choice among the electors, but more on his being a known hardliner in favor of a more traditional view on faith and religiosity and for being well-known for his staunch opposition for liberation theology and reformation within the catholic hierarchy.

Many had desired the next pope to test the limit of modernism and had earlier hopes for a looser attitude on issues like women being accepted finally as clergy members and on such other matters as contraception and gay marriages. With Cardinal Ratzinger on hand, they have to kiss their hopes to the wind.

The new pope is faced with the daunting challenge of defending the tradition of the Vatican as against the incessant calls for more liberalism and reform in the Church, and more recent events like the heated debates on gay marriages in North America as well as on abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research, will keep Pope Benedict XVI up on his toes and busier than a rat.

At 78 years old, we all know that Pope Benedict’s term won’t be much longer than a decade but with the burning issues on faith brimming around the world today, his papacy may just be one of the most significant ever.

Joseph Ratzinger is pope in these most crucial times.

The Bet Is On

2005-04-19T13:43:00.000+08:00

Who do you see as the next pope? What are the chances? Look who’s betting?

Nobody seems to be complaining and no one seems to mind this lottery on the most crucial question being resolved now in the whole catholic world, and perhaps in the entirety of worldly issues.

Nope. I am not the one to complain. Betting is never seen as a virtue yet I say maybe this time, we can’t be too tight-assed on this. A little fun wouldn’t hurt I guess. For once there, I thought I was expecting an official statement from the Holy See, invoking everyone to stop these foolish things—these widespread betting on who would be the next main man in the Vatican City.

Days ago, Francis Arinze was the in the surprise lead among bettors in Great Britain. The cardinal from Nigeria might just usher in a new age in Catholicism, towards more openness and human equality. Although, I thought the world is yet unprepared to embrace a black pope. But who, knows. We might just be in for a historic moment.

As the conclave is about to start, Germany’s Joseph Ratzinger is now heavily favored, unlike say, five days ago. This must be the result of him being in the forefront of the process to choose the pope, as he had officiated in almost every important mass in Rome in the days immediately after the death of John Paul II. Well, it is really not a surprise to see him as a big favorite since he is just too well known among the priesthood all over world, being the Dean of the College of Cardinal, and the foremost adviser of the late John Paul II when the latter was still alive. In short, he is an insider and one who knows the in and outs of the Vatican so well.

Yet, nothing is sure yet. Cardinal Ratzinger himself had voiced out that he didn’t desire the papal job because for one, he is already too old at 74, knowing it as a very great burden and responsibility. And there is this hidden rule in the history of the papal conclave that the early favorites are always not chosen. John Paul II himself was a surprise winner of the conclave in 1978.

Ratzinger may be too old but he is a very good and intelligent priest and he may just be right for a short papacy, a sort of bridging the gap period. But he says he doesn’t want the job. Whatever.

Systems Down!

2005-04-19T13:42:00.000+08:00

About two days ago, my computer started on a wrong note with a strange prompt on the screen that ordered me to add driver to a new hardware device that was newly found. This was a very familiar sight, because the last time it did appear, my computer was disabled entirely.

Immediately, I applied a thorough scan of my drives and there I determined about six different viruses that had infected my system, most of them “downloader Trojans”. I have always been careful against viruses, so careful even that I do not use password enabled services when I am not using my own computer. I had always been operating behind a firewall but alas, the very few moments that I disabled my firewall (to speed up downloads of heavy executables), are the few seconds that these viruses needed to infiltrate my computer. I am warning you to be always careful and always protect yourself by using a firewall whenever you are online.

I do not exactly know what these “downloader Trojans” do but one thing is sure, it disabled my internet connection so gravely. Maybe they were meant, as their names suggest, as worms and spiders that wanted to download some of my files. It is such a flattery that some souls had to send these Trojan viruses just to get hold of my writings. I would have given it all to them had they asked it properly. Or maybe, they just meant to harm my system. By the number of the Trojans that infiltrated my system, you could tell someone or some souls really targeted me for intrusions. If it were random, the number of virus would not have been as high as six just in one night. We all get “virused” once in a while, but not six instances in a 24 hour period.

So I tried my best to reconfigure my operating system but couldn’t seem to tackle the major error in it. I had some amateur skill on recreating corrupted files but this time, the problem had just gotten worse. Half-baked knowledge was harmful to me this time.

The last time I restarted my computer, a blank screen just appeared. Such vicious, vicious viruses.

So I had to do these postings at a nearby café and while my computer is out for a vacation in my favorite neighborhood computer shop, I had to content myself with lesser time online, and more infrequent postings. I hope my computer would rise again like a phoenix from the flame.

Gangland!

2005-04-16T18:34:00.000+08:00

These past few days, a spate of crimes had embraced the front pages of our papers like movie banters and I thought I was watching one huge epical Hollywood gangster movie, the sort made by the likes of Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola, only this time the seeming “movie” involves real characters and the onset of crimes are more unrelenting and all the more pernicious. At least in gangster movies, we know for sure that the crimes ought to come to a halt sooner or later. But in the real world, the vicious cycle of killings, murders and robbery does not seem to stop.

Early morning of yesterday, three cops were chased by their fellow cops in Pasig City after they carried out a daring hold-up in broad daylight. It is by luck that cops are not usually trained in making great heist that the criminal-cum-cops were caught red-handed, sending one of them to the hospital with a bullet in his face. For the life of me, I’ve never thought I’d see the day when some of our active police officers would be pursued and chased by their own fellow cops along our urban streets, in full view of the populace they had swore to serve and protect. But as if in any action movie, every thing seem possible and every twist seem probable.

About two days ago, a former legislator was gunned down while supping up in a diner along Shaw Boulevard and then the assailant was seen just slowly walking away from the crime scene, and even took a jeepney afterwards. Talk about police visibility. The way ex-congressman Henry Lanot was murdered seemed movie-surreal; in the kind of circumstances only the most cutting-edge scriptwriter could be able to come up with. In fact, the dining area of the Jade Palace was eerily and markedly reminiscent of the restaurant where Michael Corleone, the main character of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather”, did his first kill, in that particular scene where he had to hide his pistol inside the comfort room beforehand in order to evade detection. I do not mean any disrespect to the departed soul of the ex-solon, but I am just stressing how crimes nowadays are being committed so daringly that they are being carried out as if some criminals have been watching too much action films lately---where murder becomes a fantasy and where a man’s life is nothing but a movie prop.

From the papers, we found out that despite the alarming number of killings of journalists in our country, only one such murder has been solved. And this desperation adds up to the whole surrealism of what appears to be an unending chain of killings after killings, murders and heists in broad daylight that marks our urban life today, and no one seems to be doing something about it and our authorities seem to be at a lost on what to do. We are like in some Hollywood gangster movie were life is cheap and policemen only appear when everything seems to be all too late. “These are the days of living dangerously”, said one character from a movie in my mind.

Just this morning, a television news update reported how two hundred policemen or so raided a barangay in one of the slum areas in Manila and arrested anyone who “looked or moved suspicious”, aiming to rid the area of wanted criminals who are said to be hiding there. This must be what they call a “saturation drive”.

Afterwards, the television report showed how those who were arrested were being ushered one by one into police vehicles with their handcuffed-hands placed at their back, while some of the raiding policemen lugged along around the area, looking as if they had felt great relief upon the success of their operation. Those policemen should not feel any relief at all or feel any sense of success out of anything and their minds should in fact be disabused on these matters, because the raid looked more to me of hamletting than being a regular police work (Hamletting is the notorious method used by the U.S. Military in Vietnam where American soldiers approached ill-fated rural communities that were suspected of harboring enemies and arrested and harassed every person found there, regardless if they were old men, women or children.). This practice of fishing out for criminals through “saturation drives” is to me nothing but a lame and lazy excuse for not doing real police work and it is a shameless flouting of human rights and the due process of law. Apprehending and cornering criminals should always be done through apt means like stakeouts, entrapment and pursuits, among other means. The news update did not elaborate if the policemen were carrying with them arrest warrants for each person to be arrested, but as soon as now, I greatly doubt it. There couldn’t be a warrant of arrest naming “any John Doe acting or moving suspiciously” within sight. I may be mistaken but I just do not think there could be a “pre-emptive” warrant of arrest.

The crimes committed in our urban streets nowadays are becoming more and more daring that even Don Corleone would blush at their profane viciousness. On the one hand, our policemen become lazier with each passing day and at times become the propagator of crimes themselves. God help the Philippines.

Getting Closer, Yet Still Worlds Apart

2005-04-13T17:48:00.000+08:00

Recently, another high point in relations among Southeast Asian countries was forged in the form of an international agreement that allows visa-free and unimpeded travel between the Philippines and Laos. At present most of the member countries of ASEAN does not require visa when its citizens move from one country to another within the region, including Singapore, its most economically advanced member. This would mean that mere passport holders could gain entry into most of the ASEAN countries without any need for visa, just like when one travels to Hong Kong. For me, this is one very positive benefit that we have gained ever since five southeast Asian countries have decided to band together in 1967 to form ASEAN, a conglomerate of states joining hands together to aim for more social and economic cooperation.

This is entirely refreshing---this visa-exemption among ASEAN countries---knowing fully well how difficult it is for most of us to gain entry to many other countries (especially rich countries like the United States and countries in Europe) without the visa requirement; one document that is beyond the access of most Filipinos. This situation somewhat infuriates me, where richer countries require so much from travelers from poorer nations, asking for wealth here and properties there to show before any issuance of visa as if only the rich have the right to travel, and while their citizens could easily gain access to our territories without any difficulty whatsoever. On the other hand, we all have to fall into long and tedious lines just in order to have a hand on that ever-rare visa, like mongers on a night market bargain extravaganza. It is not extravaganza in any sense to me.

But here in Southeast Asia, among countries sharing similar debacles both social and political and having the same general economic level of prosperity, travel is unimpeded and no one is turned away like an unwanted visitor. Of course, Malaysia and Thailand are not exactly Los Angeles or Copenhagen, but it helps to think that many from Los Angeles and Copenhagen travel all the length of the world just in order to be in Thailand or Singapore when they aim to have temporary but sublime pleasures in paradise or paradise-like enclaves.

ASEAN has gone a long, long way and one of its laudable objectives is the freer flow of business (of goods and capital) within the region in about a decade’s time and possibly, a more integrated social life among the inhabitants similar to that appertaining in the European Union. There were some buzz before that a single currency may be used in the entire region sometime in the future although at this point, this is a little difficult to visualize knowing how the different economies in ASEAN are so disparate at many significant points despite of me saying earlier that they all share the same general economic prosperity. A singular currency demands more than what could be achieve now; like the need for a central monetary agency, price index commonality, interest rates stability, uniformity in inflation, unvarying reserves for each nation, absence of or minimal foreign debts and many other factors. Maybe in fifty or so years from now, ASEAN will be more contiguous and united in economic terms. We have gone closer in many ways, but still worlds apart in some.

The aim for a single currency in ASEAN may be farfetched at this time but a shared market is not and is already in motion while we speak. Our grocery stores are now---if you just have noticed lately---filled with goods from Thailand, Indonesia or Malaysia, and this presently reflects the stronger economic ties among ASEAN countries. This economic unity may not appear to be relevant to many of us but if we take a closer look, we are actually looking towards a far more expanded market where our producers will not only be contemplating a market of 80 million Filipinos but possibly, a gigantic market of nearly half a billion inhabitants of the ASEAN region. The potential for growth in productivity is unimaginably enormous and not only on goods but also in services where there will come a time in the future that our accounting graduates could look forward to a career in banking and finance Malaysian style. Already, many Filipinos are hired as executives in many financial and industrial companies in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur and our teachers are teaching English in many Thai colleges and universities.

If European states found out that they are far better off if they banded together more tightly, I think Southeast Asian countries ought to do the same. A united herd is far more virile and surviving than an escalated one. In unity, there is always strength.

The Art Of Playing Dumb

2005-04-12T10:35:00.000+08:00

The U.S. Charge d’ affaires Joseph Mussomeli is one diplomat breaking the rules of diplomacy---and that at such a slipshod conduct. According to the U.S. number two man here, certain parts of Mindanao are so “porous” and “lawless” that he sees an Afghanistan situation brimming there if nothing is done to improve the effort against terrorism in this country. And then he has to say those critical lamentations before the foreign media. What a way of “diplomatizing”. It must be the new American way of making friends. I suspect that some of the guys put there in the U.S. Embassy are CIA first and diplomat secondarily for they sure talk the talk of international blackmailing and dark-clouding the way those American undercover are always good at.

Mussomeli knew very well that we are in such a dire fiscal crisis that he had a problem in fact why our politicians are mostly occupied with economic concerns—like raising taxes—and not fighting terrorism and yet he had to say something that would further shoo away the dollars trickling towards our shores. With the unflattering declarations that he made before the Australian media, Mussomeli might just have added some nails into our economic coffin. If it indeed it were true---as Mussomeli tried to paint before international media---that there is an Afghanistan situation in this part of the world, no tourists would bathe in our tropical seas even if they are nearly paradise and not even the most profit-hungry capitalist would put top dollar in our market. What Mussomeli did might just have brought our economy nearly an eon back, where foreign capital is rarer than diamonds and tourists receipts an alien thing. And beside that, our Standards and Poor credit ratings would further be set into a downward spiral, and that would mean no easy dollar loans for our private sector, and our government bonds wouldn’t be able to float easily in the big global money market. (I felt at times that the credit rating agency Standard and Poor is somewhat a form heckling towards third-word countries for how come they had to choose such name; I mean, who is “standard” and who is “poor”?)

If we have friends like Mussomeli, why do we need enemies?

What we got here is but another harsh treatment of what I call as “The Art of Playing Dumb”. It is a kind of foreign policy thing being applied by first world countries like America and some other. Powerful nations with hidden agendas would play dumb and ignorant in order for them to gain some end, by way of applying ugly means to justify their aims. Here how it operates. Usually, as a matter of policy, some hatchet men would pretend that they are so dumb that they do not know anything about a certain region and announce to the international media some general declarations that do not entirely reflect the real situation there, and as the wrong picture is painted, chaos and disorder would ensue, or least it would be believed that chaos and mayhem had really ensued, and whatever that country would decide to do to “remedy the situation” would be seen as a heroic effort in the eyes of the international community and in that manner, they get away with murder.

In this particular situation, we all know that Mindanao may be in such trouble now but the situation there is nothing near the hellish disorder appertaining to Afghanistan in the Taliban days---the kind of situation that had “justified” its invasion by America. But Mussomeli had to make some “irresponsible” and “unreflective” comments even though we know that any person who had been in this country for at least a month or two would have surely known that Mindanao is never at the level of an Afghanistan mayhem. It doesn’t have to take a rocket scientist to know this easily verifiable data. The U.S. Embassy surely has some highly reliable intelligence network operating here that for certain, Mussomeli must have known that Mindanao is in no way near an Afghanistan situation. But for some reason, Mussomeli spoke like he was a “dumb” person who has no education in his head. And so I suspect that he was just “playing dumb”.

I come from Mindanao and I have not seen any woman wearing burkas here or some public execution done in a sports stadium. Of course, we got bombs exploding every now and then in some unfortunate urban places, but Israel and Pakistan had more and yet nobody is saying that they are the next Afghanistan.

So what could have lead Mr. Mussomeli to say those “dumb” things. It might be because of some veiled agendas or secret aims. Maybe the United States government is really hell-bent on re-establishing a major military presence here that they have to play dumb and say something hellish about the Philippines, in order sell the idea of another Subic or Clark here. Maybe they want a military base in Mindanao. Or maybe they are just negotiating for more military aids from their own government on the sincere intention to help the Philippines get more war money and military toys. Yes, sometimes this game of playing dumb may be grounded on a heartfelt intention to help---but more often they are not.

Playing dumb as a method of pushing a major foreign policy has been employed by many countries like America in the past and sometimes they work but often they do not. And even if the aims are achieved, the backlash is often unkindly and devastating. The most recent example of this kind of international endgame was America’s claim that Saddam Hussein had links with Osama bin Laden and that chemical weapons were all abound in Baghdad. To this day, no chemical weapon cache was found in any place in Iraq despite incessant search and the Saddam and Osama link appears to be just an amateurish rhetoric. Yet, America had to play dumb and claim the wrong things in order for them to gain justification to invade Iraq. Now that Iraq is embracing democracy, the method of playing dumb may have worked just as well for President George W. Bush and democracy in general, but many still see it as an ugly interference by one country to another and a form of shameless bullying.

In the years leading to the World War II, major western powers like America and Great Britain “played dumb” and disregarded the warning from many insiders that Hitler was actually harboring a megalomaniac ambition to rule the world and was already then murdering thousands of Jews in Auschwitz. The British Prime Minister then had even acquiesced with Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Slavic region believing it would be for the best. The negligence and “playing dumb” of the western powers at that time resulted to the most traumatic events of our modern history, that is, the devilish murder of thousands of Jews---an unforgettable tragedy that could have been prevented if the western powers had taken action much earlier.

When I was working then for a World Bank-funded project agency, we had to make a tour of the whole Mindanao area with some of the World Bank guys and we made a brief sojourn into the Saranggani Bay area near General Santos City. Some people from Malacañang where with us and I somehow overheard them in a passing conversation how the bay there was such a fine place for the U.S. Military Base and they were talking about it like it was a sure thing to come and not in any uncertain manner. I had wondered then if the plan was true at all. I had suspected then that the plan for putting up a U.S. Military Base in Mindanao was some form of a secret agenda of the Philippine and U.S. government which I had gotten to learn somehow through some careless remarks made while an “outsider” like me was present. Of course until now, I still doubt if there was such a grand plan to put up a U.S. Military base in Mindanao but it helps to point out that the new and very modern international airport found General Santos City, one that could handle even the biggest Boeing airliner, was funded entirely by the U.S. Government (I couldn’t confirm this data, but this I heard). So perhaps, America really has a well drawn-out plan to re-establish major military presence here in our country and this notion is not farfetched knowing that the Philippines is considered as a very strategic region in relation to America’s aim to establish a very strong presence in Asia. I am not saying these things because I am viciously anti-American, or like I was a communist, but I am just saying these things as a backgrounder of what perhaps could have led the American Embassy to issue some “dumb” observations of our country (like calling it the next Afghanistan) knowing fully well how disparaging those comments are to our ailing economy.

Now we see perhaps why at times personalities like Mussomeli had to play dumb at times. Although at one point there, I really thought Joseph Mussomeli was really dumb and irresponsible.

To Tinker Or Not To Tinker

2005-04-10T21:25:00.000+08:00

Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s latest public soliloquy is just about timely, but not encouraging to many of her fellow lawyerly tribesmen and tribeswomen.

The ever vocal lady of the Senate may have on Saturday morning awaken to the blaring news that the bar examination results were finally out and the usual cacophony of noises and ruminations about it (like the who’s who in the top spot, and if what school lords over the rest) may have perhaps earned her now-famous ire that she decided to banish this thing called “bar examinations.”

You heard it right, the lady wants the bar examinations abolished because according to her, “passing the bar is just a matter of chance and luck” and that it is only “one of the index of legal competence”. It felt a little bizarre to hear those highly undermining comments from one who topped the bar herself. But since she is such a famous legal mind, maybe there is more to her nitpicking than meets the eye.

The call for the abolition of the annual bar examination is not already new to us and is in fact a recurrent issue for many years now. For one, there was this one infamous legal case known as “The Bar Flunkers’ Suit” where a group of unsuccessful bar examinees petitioned the Supreme Court to entirely set aside the bar and declare every law graduate fit to practice law, reasoning out among others that in other countries like Indonesia, the law graduate need not pass any further examination in order to be called a lawyer. Of course, the suit did not prosper otherwise we would not be talking of these things at this time.

In her disembowelment of the bar, Senator Santiago cited a study made by the former dean of the U.P. College of Law Merlin Magallona and lawyer Manuel Flores Bonifacio where it was put forward that many in the legal profession feel that the bar examinations is never the true test of one’s competency to practice law primarily because “it is merely a test of memory” and not of the reasoning prowess of the aspirants and that “it does not guarantee a successful legal practice”. I can perhaps agree that at a certain point, the bar examinations given by the Supreme Court every September of the year merely test the law students’ ability to memorize and enumerate hundreds of legal provisions but it would seem to be a little silly to expect the bar to be a guarantee for a successful legal practice because it will never be. Just like there is no guarantee that a guy with a great singing voice will be successful one day in a showbiz career. There’s no finality to any success---and as in a cliché, there is no shortcut to it. You may be a virtuoso violinist but with a very bad attitude, you won’t even get near to watching an orchestra play, much less to be playing in it. We all know that a good legal practice is dependent on some other factors like an amiable personality, a great conversational skill and good contacts in the community among others. Yet, a lawyer may still be competent as a lawyer although he may not be successful in practice. Just like when a doctor may still be a good doctor although he may have ended miserably poor for not having had a profitable clinic, where he merely poured all his time and effort in a small rural hospital.

Now, despite my disagreement to the idea that the bar examinations should always be a “guarantee” to a successful legal practice, it is not easy to debunked this recent call for the abolishment of the bar especially when Senator Santiago clearly made real sense when she propositioned that another test similar to the National Medical Admission Test (NMAT) that is given to medical students in our country, would be applied instead along with an internship program that could hone the legal competence of law students in the “real world” even while they are still in law school. Clearly, these particular suggestions may just improve our legal profession and I say, this issue should be given the proper attention by our Congress.

In the end, to tinker with the bar examination is to tinker with a long-held tradition (which may not be necessarily good for us) that would not go away as easily and not without grave repercussions. The problem with scrapping the bar examinations is that it would greatly undermine the quality of lawyers in our midst and the whole legal profession for that matter. If they think that the bar examinations is not the right litmus test to determine who should or should not become lawyers, then they should think of another one in a jiffy; and in fact, one that should test the discipline of the law student all the more where aside from the written examinations, oral examinations should also be instituted to test the conversational skill of the aspirants as well as their reasoning prowess along with actual field trainings and seminars. That may seem to have just complicated the situation all the more but hey, we really have no choice here. Let us remember that lawyers are particularly involved in the defense of very salient things, like the protection of rights and properties of a person, as well as the threatened liberties of an accused in a criminal case, and may at some extent be protecting the very life of an individual---just like doctors do. Surely you wouldn’t want to put any man’s life in the hands of one who is of doubtful competence. Not to any half-baked lawyer or to any half-baked doctor.

What I see best in the this situation is a sort of compromise where the Rules of Court set by the Supreme Court may be amended a little to allow underbar law graduates (upon the onset of certain conditions like the gaining of sufficient training through seminars and workshops that are strictly administered by the Supreme Court) to serve our courts in some legal concerns like prosecution as fiscal assistants and if possible as judicial assistants in matters of case dispositions. This way, the problem on the humongous case backlog of the courts may be hastened. The slow and turtle pace processing of cases by our courts is mainly blamed to the lack of lawyers willing to serve in low-paying court positions. If we could in some way allow underbar law graduates to serve in our courts, this particular problem may be given the right solution without undermining the quality and credibility of our legal practitioners.

Flooding our society with lawyers---by allowing just about every underbar law graduate to practice law in general---would do us more harm than good and it may even kill the practice of law in our country. We may have access to cheaper lawyers, but justice on our shores will be all the more be flawed and unreliable if the legal profession would be mostly left unregulated. For certain, Senator Santiago hasn’t been contemplating this kind of situation to happen but it helps to point out the dire consequences if we are to tinker with tradition without the proper weighing of the benefits as against the harm.

Blog News, Anyone?

2005-04-08T19:48:00.000+08:00

Hear ye’ all Bloggers, we’ve turned another milestone. In the Periscope section of the March 21, 2005 issue of Newsweek, there is this item on blogging titled “BLOGS: Now It’s Literature”. It reported actually how certain web logs in Japan were not only successful online but had found their way into the bestseller list among the bookstands there. Primarily, the blog “Train Man” sold approximately half a million copies when it was turned into a book. “Train Man” started on the Internet just about when its Japanese author went online to ask for advises and suggestions from surfers on how to woo a girl he had recently met on a train. Thousands logged into his blog and gave him numerous dating tips and encouragement and two months later, he got the girl. This modern day fairy tale set within the subways of Tokyo caught the fancy of many that it apparently prodded a publisher to transforms it into a book and make money on it, complete with all the comments and emoticons, even including the usual grammatical and typographical errors we often see in every web log’s comment box.

The success of the “Train Man” has led other Japanese bloggers to take their spin on book publishing and found similar success. Notable was the blog “My Devilish Wife Journal: A True Story”, where a young man laments continually about his self-centered wife. Another weblog in the bookstands there is “This Week My Wife Is having An Affair” which sold about 43,000 copies as a book. Not bad, huh.

I couldn’t find the link to the above-mentioned blogs, even when I had to google them a thousand and one times. The thing is “Train Man” would have been titled in Japanese and I haven’t got a clue what the words “train” and “man” in Nippongo.

So I guess, we bloggers should keep at it and blog all the more and who knows that perhaps one day, some book publisher would take notice and transform some of us into the net counterpart of John Grisham or Tom Wolfe. It may not be as easy as we would like to think it is, where it is obvious that those Japanese web logs that I had mentioned above have gained popularity mainly because of their sordid subject matters like infidelity and deceit. Yet “Train Man”, the most successful of the lot, certainly spoke of an uplifting thing called “love”, and that tells us that it ain’t such a longshot for any of us to expect to get published someday and that we do not have to write anything capricious in order to get noticed.

Am I encouraging commercialism here? No, but by aiming to get our blogs published as a book, we may be suspected of selling out; that is, blogging just for money’s sake and not for the things we truly believe in. But hey, money ain’t that bad at all---and Bob Dylan got to speak his mind and still made money for it.

So what Filipino blog or blogs do you think can get published at this time and sell well on National Bookstore?

A Requiem For The Pope

2005-04-08T19:36:00.000+08:00

The Old Man Has Found A Great Well
(A Requiem For Karol Josef Wojtyla 1920-2005)

This one son of Poland has finally reached the bend
yonder beyond the oceans of the faithful,
and one day became the son of the world
that found the great well of worldly understanding and brotherhood;
And he made this well flourish like a seeding flower
that blossomed so white in purity and vibrancy---
It is there for anyone to see,
for any soul who was touched by his hands,
even for a moment or two;
those hands that had turned even the most wrenched of hearts
into a soft billowy water that would run finally
towards the one and singular faith in the Mightiness of God.
And now he found his own soul’s great well,
the one that we all harness in our mind
where in a day or two, our eyes would lay witness someday
to the crystals of heavens and the joyful
trumpeting of the angels.

When Was The Last Time You Read A Book For The Second Time Around and Actually Felt Like It Was The First Time?

2005-04-06T17:11:00.000+08:00

I just did. Right now, I am still at a lost why in the world Eva Miranda had to disappear into the great abyss of anonymity when everything seems to have been settled and done with. I am speaking here about two of the characters and the end parts of the John Grisham book “The Partner” which was released in 1997, so many years after “The Firm” had caught the book world by storm. Yeah, I remember too well how Mr. Grisham had virtually stormed into the book scene without warning about a decade ago and how he went on to overshadow every other novelist at that time. I have just read John Grisham’s “The Partner” for the second time around.

Just about a week ago, I have felt that the summer season could afford me a lot of hours with nothing better to do that I decided for myself that I would have ample time to read a good novel again, while the weather was always warm and breezy in the afternoon. I almost went downtown to scour for new and old book titles that would suit my current reading fancy but just when I was about to take the shower, a “brilliant idea” entered my mind. I said to myself that I could actually save nearly half of a thousand bucks for a new book if I would just go foraging for books that I have bought before but hadn’t find the time to read them. I decided that I should do that. In fact, I might just end up buying a new title now and then just postpone reading it for a reason or two. Better be safe than regret later.

I had often in the past set aside books that I have just bought for reasons unique to each book. For example, when I started reading Pat Conroy’s “Beach Music”, I was reading it with my expectations about it set too high that I ended up just ignoring in the long run. I bought “Beach Music” having in mind that perhaps Pat Conroy could outdo himself and make another work better than “The Prince of Tides” or at least similarly invigorating. But to my dismay, I realized soon after that “The Prince of Tides” is a work that is difficult to be outdone, even by Pat Conroy himself, and it was so good that there might not be another book that could surpass its emotional vibrancy. So I just put aside “Beach Music” and postponed reading it, hoping that one day I’d find some time to read it. That time have not yet come as of this moment. “The Prince of Tides” is by the way one of my most favorite books. I have actually read it about four times already, believe it or not.

And then there was “A Suitable Boy” by Vikhram Seth, a sprawling saga that brings into life the unique and colorful Indian tradition on family and marriages. The story is based mainly on two characters namely Lata and her mother but the novel is so huge that it was the thickest novel that I had possessed. In the middle of my reading of it, I was bound for Manila to take the bar examinations and so I had to set it aside. I was already in the part where Lata’s mother was about to find a “suitable boy” for her, as she went toddling like a child among the festivities in their neighborhood and buying a certain myna bird from the nearby market. The gigantic novel pictured how it was all too colorful, happy and festive Indian occasions were, from marriages to natal days, and perhaps even in their burials. I enjoyed reading it but had to discontinue it for a while. Until now, I still haven’t found the right amount of time to finish this sprawling Indian novel. And so “A Suitable Boy” was one of the candidates that I had planned to read this summer.

My copy of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” was a gift to me by my wife when we were still “untied” to each other and it contain an endearing scribble from her. Perhaps, the copy was such a memento to me that I had decided to leave it untouched. Actually, the main reason why I did not proceed to read it entirely was because of its inherent enormousness---its extent is just too demanding and overwhelming, both at the same time. It was another colossal book that tested my patience to the hilt. I wanted to read it through and through but I have always procrastinated on Tolstoy, believing that there’d be a day that I’d be able to consume his two great works (the other one being “Anna Karerina”) or them consuming me. Whichever way, the “consumption” hasn’t happen yet. Maybe, summertime would give me the proper patience to tackle Tolstoy, the most direct rival of my most favorite author, Feodor Dostoyevsky.

There was also Salman Rushdie’s “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and I remember quite well that it was one of the books that I haven’t finished reading in the past. I lighted with great zest when I remember all at once that before I left it in midway, I was enjoying it so much that now, as I have come to notice it again, I could not point out too well the reason or reasons why I had to abandoned it in the first place. Sometimes our memory just fails us.

Just when I was about to locate the Salman Rushdie work, I stumbled unknowingly into John Grisham’s “The Partner” and almost threw it aside knowing too well that there is no Grisham book in my cabinet that went unread. But for some reason, I started flicking at its beginning pages and I there I read the beginning passages where a bunch of Brazilian hoodlums was on a stakeout upon the person of a certain Danilo Silva. I started to ask if I remember anything about Danilo Silva and I had some feint memory. The first parts of the book were paced so rhythmically and major mysteries were built in the beginning pages that I had more questions in my mind. Will they eventually find him? How did the Brazilian jungle become one of the scenes of a Grisham tale (this had intrigued me so much that I continued to leaf through the book).I asked more questions and before I knew it, I forgot about Salman Rushdie and decided to read “The Partner” instead.

Reading “The Partner” for the second time around was such an enjoyable experience to me that it actually felt like I was reading it for the first time; and then liking it so much. It was like reading a book like Feodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” where the first sentences of the book grabs at your attention by the throat and never let go until the end was about to come. When I was in highschool, I remember reading the espionage thrillers of Frederick Forsythe, particularly “The Fourth Protocol” and “The Days of The Jackal” and “The Partner” brought back similar sort of excitement that I had felt then, as I salivated on pages after pages and read it so passionately that I finished reading it in merely five days. I don’t know if five days was fast enough but I never had finished a book in just a week’s time, not even “Catcher In The Rye”.

John Grisham is what we say the more commercial writer in the lot and we don’t know exactly if one day he’d go down among the literary giants of our time, which I gravely doubt. But on second reading, I thought “The Partner” was an entirely good read and a well-thought-of story, where everything seems to be plausible and yet at the same time remarkably outlandish and far-fetched. I don’t exactly know what I meant by that.

I am not perhaps alone in the observation that “The Partner” is one highly-enjoyable book because this novel was a main selection of the Literary Guild when it was released in 1997, and of course we all know that the Literary Guild has a known credibility to rate the import of each book, among other book circles; and this is one mean feat for Mr. Grisham. There are some smart and tidy twists in this novel that would take you by surprise, as if you are being poured on with a pail of cold water each time.

I have read many other John Grisham book but so far, I had enjoyed this one the most and what’s funny about this is that I realized it only upon reading it for the second time around.

So when was the last time you read a book for the second time around and actually enjoyed it?

The Population Question: To Triumph In the Face of Adversity

2005-04-04T20:49:00.000+08:00

A Philippine Daily Inquirer news update this afternoon called the Church incessant stance against birth control a “demographic timebomb”. I asked what bomb? Haven’t it yet exploded in our faces? Or would it really explode?

The Philippines today is said to have one of the highest population growth rate in the world and in thirty years, we are set to double in numbers from the present number of 84 million Filipino souls. Our national leaders are pushing the panic button because of this and thus the Congress is mulling the eventual passing of the “Responsible Parenthood and Population Act”, a bill that has already earned its own share of controversy.

I think we should define clearly where the lines are in this population issue and strictly set the parameters of the question. For certain, the State is so worried about the population explosion and that is why it is currently propagating birth control programs in order to stave away a future where there would be just too many Filipino mouths to feed and too little food available. On the one hand, the Church is strongly against any form of contraception and is now at loggerhead with the present Arroyo administration because of this (it was at odds even with other administrations in the past). We see two “immovable forces” here that moves towards an inevitable head-on collision and what I see is that, collision may still be evaded only if State and Church could begin “to agree to disagree”.

The Church under our laws is a juridical person and just like any other person, it has the right to speak or not to speak. Despite our constitution’s negation of intervention by the Church into State matters, and vice versa, no law can prevent Church leaders to declare its own ideas on the population issue, and if it criticizes the government for its pro-contraception policies, this is but a consequence of democracy and it may do as well---of course within the limits set for the freedom of press and of expression. The Church I think has no choice but to act and speak according to the tenets of its faith.

The State on the one and has the sole prerogative to manage the nation’s various concerns according to accepted wisdom, in consonance to the leanings ensconced in our fundamental laws and even the Church has no personality to cut down any of its decisions.

In the light of the things said above, the Church and State should “agree to disagree” for they are clearly harboring irreconcilable differences, so irreconcilable in fact that it may take a thousand days and a thousand nights to debate the population issue and most likely, they still won’t meet a delta of understanding by then. So live and let live.

Am I worried about population explosion? Of course, I am. But I always believe that in adversity, our people will become stronger and more resilient that despite the problems brought about by a burgeoning population, we can still survive and be capable enough to feed our people. I do not entirely agree that it is an irrefutable conclusion that once population is high, the people will suffer. The Malthusian Theory has its own failings and it has not been perfect all along. Japan has nearly double our population right now even though its geographic size is just as small as ours but it could feed its people even at more times than necessary. The Japanese people had proven that with resiliency and persistent will to arise from any adversity, a high population would not be a hindrance to the production of wealth and resources that is more than enough to feed the people.

World’s population is generally on the upswing and this is just but expected for it is man’s nature to produce and procreate, it can’t be help. It is downswings in population numbers that should be an anomaly of nature. Remember that just a few centuries ago, world’s population was so minimal that you’d think life was so much better then. But it wasn’t. Would you opt to live in the 12th century, where plaques abound and often-cruel wars between nations and kingdoms proliferated from Asia to Europe, or would you still want to live at the present world. I would still choose to live in the present world anytime. Population in the 12th century was so small that elephants may have been more in number than humans but it does not mean that mankind had live a more sublime existence then than we do today. The proliferation of the human race is one of the main reasons why we had begun to discover and invent things, in order to struggle against adversities. If we were not strained to feed more mouths, no one would have invented the wheel. Necessity they say is the mother of all invention.

Population growth is a natural consequence of existence. It is when population starts to decline radically that one can suspect an anomaly.

A Man of Unparalled Vision

2005-04-03T09:47:00.000+08:00

Today, a great and extraordinary man has passed away. Pope John Paul III has finally gone to the Kingdom that he had served so well. I am saddened by this news but I celebrate the man so greatly, with all respect and reverence. Will there be another pope as sublime as he? Or for that matter, will there be another man in this time, as great as he? I hope so.

DEUTERIUM : The White Gold of The Philippines.

2005-04-01T17:33:00.000+08:00

When I was in highschool, Michael Peralta, an old neighborhood friend from Carmen Street but who is now residing in Los Angeles, once spoke to me in a very animated fashion how the Philippines could one day become the richest country in the world. As a prelude, Michael said to me that his father had some vital information why a number of foreigners were in the country for a very secret purpose. I wondered loudly to him how secret it was and asked him if he could actually let me know some of the “secret’. He then informed me without hesitation that the foreigners were here mainly to study and find out ways on how to extract deuterium from the Philippine seas. I asked how come his father knew about all those stuff and what was “deuterium” in the first place. With gasping breath, and with gleaming pride for that matter, Michael told me as a matter of fact that his father was a war veteran and because of this, he had American contacts in the CIA. The CIA thing sounded preposterous to me at that time but when I recently read some articles in the Internet about deuterium, I started to wonder if the CIA talk of Michael was plausible after all and that maybe the CIA was behind the sudden departure of Michael’s whole family to Los Angeles later that year, where in a year’s time he was already driving a very exotic looking red corvette (might be from second hand store) as evidenced by a picture that he had sent to the neighborhood kids through a very kind uncle. This story may start to sound like a brimming Tom Clancy thriller but before anything gets out of hand, that CIA talk of Michael is just that and nothing else t o it I am pretty sure on that and their immigration to America was due mainly to his father being a USAFFE during World War II. But Michael’s rambling on deuterium was completely a different matter---it sounded to me then so awfully good that I had wished it to be true already even though it wasn’t true at all at that time, and even now.

There is really something to this issue on deuterium that lingers long and never goes away completely. It had been virtually popping and bobbing up in the local media every now and then---especially in the last couple of decades. The Cebu-based news outfit The Freeman published the most recent news article on deuterium. In that article, Freeman publicized a certain study on deuterium by a Filipino scientist working in a Canadian agency. Canada by the way is the world’s leading producer and consumer of deuterium as an energy source. There had been many rumors and hush-hush talks before about certain groups of foreigners, possibly American and sometimes German, that were in the country to initiate drilling projects that should siphon-off the coveted deuterium from the Philippine seas. All those talks just died down however and nobody really minded them, perhaps everyone just disregarded some weird-sounding element that are supposedly found in the Philippines in great volume. In fact, even as we speak now, I would not be surprised if Exxon or Shell has some of its people working night and day trying to unravel the key to gathering the millions of barrels of “white gold” underneath our seas.

I was watching Sentro last night, the upstart news program from ABC 5, and heard Ms. Ali Sotto do some lighter take on the news as she reported how hydrogen-fuelled cars were already running in the streets of Washington D.C.. This particular news segment was apparently so short that I had to scour the Internet for a more elaborate rendering of the news item. I read a couple of related news articles from not-too-famous news sites on the net.

It was reported that the United States Government, through the Department of Energy and General Motors had unveiled an $88 Million joint project in order to put a fleet of hydrogen-fuelled cars on the streets of Washington D.C., New York and Los Angeles within a year’s time. The fleet would consist merely of 40 of such cars but most of the money would be spent on putting up a number of hydrogen refueling stations all over the streets of those pilot cities since the main cause why consumers are not buying too many hydrogen-fuelled cars these days is basically due to the lack of gas stations peddling or selling hydrogen gas or liquid hydrogen. Come to think of it, even if any of us had all the money to buy this car stuff right now, like for example if some of us are sons and daughters of Taipans with money to burn, we wouldn’t be able to use them anyway, at least not for long, unless we all fly all the way to America to buy gallons and gallons of hydrogen fuel.

But again come to think about the possibilities. If only there were enough hydrogen-refueling stations all over our city streets, our days of being dependent on crude oil (freshly-drilled from the dusty sands of Sahara) would soon be over and our atmosphere would be a lot more livable since the only end product of hydrogen fuels is water. Water, instead of carbon dioxides that make our urban landscape looked orange or yellow at dusk.

I really hope that this project of GM and the United States Government would entirely succeed for reasons that we all should know by now.

And so this bit of news on hydrogen-fuelled cars reminded me of the high school talk I had with an old friend from the neighborhood concerning deuterium. What is deuterium and how does it become an energy source? Deuterium is the end product when a common tap water (H2O) is subjected to enormous pressurize of gigantic proportion that the oxygen element in the H2O compound is forced out of the combination, making the hydrogen element to purify and consolidated all the more. Since in deuterium, the hydrogen becomes so solid and unadulterated, hydrogen gas can be easily obtained from it since a natural electrolysis happens immediately the moment deuterium is exposed to room temperature. Meaning to say, when deuterium is used as a base in obtaining hydrogen gas, the generation process is much less expensive. Right now, hydrogen gas and liquid hydrogen that are often used to power jets and giant trucks, are sold at very steep prices (much more expensive than gasoline) because it is so costly to produce them, necessitating an energy-consuming and lengthy electrolysis process that are undertaken in order to separate the hydrogen compound from common water. When deuterium is used, the very expensive process of electrolysis would be bypassed and set aside in the production of hydrogen gas and therefore, obtaining hydrogen fuel becomes more efficient and less expensive by a mile.

The Philippines is identified to hold the greatest amount of deuterium deposit, somewhere in the area known as Mindanao Trench, the part of the Pacific Ocean just off the shores of Surigao. Deuterium is most prevalent in an area more widely known in the whole world as The Philipppine Deep. In the Freeman news article (dated August 2004), Dr. Anthony B. Halog, the Filipino scientist working at the Sustainable Technology Office of the Institute for Chemical Process and Environmental Technology, and the National Research Council of Canada described the Philippine deuterium wealth in this manner:

"A big deposit of 868 miles long, 52 miles at widest point, and 3 miles at deepest point, replenished by nature 24 hours a day after deuterium travels more than 12,000 kilometers from Central America to the Philippines through the span of the Pacific Ocean when Planet Earth turns on its axis from West to East in unending perpetual motion."

And it’s potential in this breathe:

"At 12 million barrels per day capacity priced at US$7.00 per barrel, this is US$84 million per day or US$30.66 billion per year, enough to wipe out all existing foreign debts of the Government in one year, revenue-wise in foreign exchange.

Public works, private construction, economic and financial booms are expected to happen in the Philippines in the same manner as those which happened in the Middle East and financial centers of the world from 1974 to 1984, with everybody earning their respective comfortable livelihood, while pricing basic prime necessities at reasonable and affordable levels."

At present, deuterium seems to be produce exclusively through an expensive synthesizing process, by subjecting ordinary tap water to enormous pressure using some highly-advanced machinery or equipment and thus the price of hydrogen fuel remain relatively out of reach from the ordinary consumers of fuels. But if the deuterium deposit under the Philippine seas can be obtained, hydrogen gas prices could become far more reasonable and affordable. If natural deuterium is utilized as the base in the production of hydrogen fuel---in both its most widely used form as hydrogen gas and liquid hydrogen---the generation process would become more efficient and much cheaper. And mind you, deuterium as a source of energy is not only useful to power cars, trucks and planes. It is also being utilized to power factories and power plants in the same manner that nuclear power plants are operated. With deuterium as moderator, nuclear power plants could do away with enriched uranium as a main fuel source and this means, deuterium use could generate a whole new specie of power plants that are a lot safer---safer by a grand mile.

The problem faced by those who wants to extract natural deuterium from the Philippines seas is probably the enormous pressure that is existing in the very area where deuterium are supposed to be found. To reach the area of deuterium concentration, a drilling system should reach a level of at least 30,000 feet deep into the ocean, where the water pressure could reach as high as 10,000 psi, or the equivalent of 10,000 tons of load pressuring from all direction. Apparently, there is no material known today that could withstand such enormous amount of pressure. Maybe diamonds could be strong enough to endure the extraordinary pressure down there but imagine how much diamonds should be needed in order to manufacture a very long tube. That’ll be unimaginable in both cost and expanse. But scientists nowadays always finds a way and when the time comes that a kind of metal could actually be developed, one that could reach ten thousand meters underwater without breaking apart and efficiently drill out barrels and barrels of sea water that contains deuterium, then that’ll be the time the Philippines could become the main hawker of fuels for the world’s cars, airplanes, buses, factories, power plants and whatever that runs and hums not by its own accord.

So deuterium may be the gasoline of the future, the main energy source of the next millennium, and the Philippines is the only country that has them naturally tucked under its seabed in an amount and breathe that replenishes on its own every time the Earth rotates and the sea shifts from side to side.

Sources :

1. The Freeman

2. Torn and Frayed In The Philippines

3. Katu News

4. Wikipedia

Terri Schiavo Dies!

2005-04-01T07:05:00.001+08:00

Just about an hour ago, Terri Schiavo finally returned to her maker. Ashes to ashes. I am a bit saddened by her death. See Full Story on Yahoo! News.

The Psychology of Expediency

2005-03-30T14:44:00.000+08:00

Senator Joker Arroyo was all over the radio this morning complaining about why the senators and congressmen had to be roused from their dreamy vacations just for a three-day special session that would start this afternoon. In Senator Arroyo’s own words, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is none less than someone who is a “killjoy” and argued that the President should have been more patient and waited instead until the present recess of Congress is over in just a week and a half’s time.

I know for certain that Senator Arroyo is one guy who never shies away from public duty, even if his life was on the line just like in a time gone by where he had risked life and limb just to stall the despotic aspirations of former President Ferdinand Marcos. But now, he complains and perhaps, this rare time that he complains gives us the idea that the VAT bill can wait after all and need not be rushed.

It would be of wisdom if the Senators would not in any way rush the passing of the new VAT legislation for any miscalculation on it could make or unmake its expected success as a wealth-generating scheme and may backfire in the form of extraordinary inflations and therefore rougher times for our economy instead of easier ones. In fact, so many questions on the VAT bill are still far from being ironed out like whether the rate should be increased to 12% or to remain at 10%, whether the corporate tax should be increased to 35% in supplement to the VAT taxation and whether or not electricity and petroleum products should remain exempted as VAT-able economic activities and objects.

The last time I heard Senator Ralph Recto discussed the Senate version of the VAT bill, there were still a lot of uncertainties and doubts as to what form or version could work best. So many things left unstudied and unelaborated. Perhaps, Malacañang could just say: “Hey guys, pass this animal called VAT bill and we’ll just redo and repair it later on if we have created a monster instead.” Now that seems to be workable. Rushed the tax law now and just reconfigure the Frankenstein later on.

The proposed new VAT legislation, as I have studied its nitty-gritty sections, has such great telling or effect on our economy, like inflation and productivity factors, and acceptability to the public as well as to the efficiency of its collection and yet it is being rushed like a fool in love. Haste makes wastes in elementary grade we have learned.

What I see is that Malacañang is just applying the “psychology of expediency” on the Senators by pulling every arms there is and make happen this three-day special session to hell or high water. The VAT bill may or may not become a law during this three-day convening but at least, the lawmakers got the message clear so that when it finally convenes for regular session a week and a half from now, the VAT bill may then be zoomed in record time.

There is one thing that may stall any deliberation this afternoon. House Minority Floor Leader Representative Francis Escudero predicts that not enough congressmen would be awaken from their Lenten sabbatical and a quorum in the house would not materialize, thus negating any opening of session (on the theory that the Senate could not hold sessions when the Lower House do not open due to technicalities like lack of quorum.) and if the Senators proceed to work on the VAT bill, Representative Escudero threatens to whistle-blow to the Supreme Court.

In politics, due to a lot of psychological warfare applied and effected ad well as games played and blackmails hurled, psychologists could make a damn good living among them politicians.

Hero For Israel An Arab

2005-03-28T08:40:00.000+08:00

In the dying minutes of a World Cup qualifer between Israel and Ireland, Abbas Suan homed in a match-tying goal that sent the Israeli fans erupting with great celebration in the stands. An Israeli Arab, Suan said later that it was sweet revenge for him after he had earned some taunting from a home crowd last month in a friendly soccer game against Croatia. The “sweet revenge” thing is a little stain in the eye but I guess those words were uttered in a “sweet attempt” to validate the citizenry of Arabs in Israel, which composes about 20% of the population in the Jewish state.

This development is something ultimately desirable in a region that was long scarred by hatred and animosity between Arabs and Jews; two people who in fact share the same semitic roots. We all remember the biblical Shem, the great grandpa of Abraham and both Jewish people and Arabs are called Semites because they all descended from him. Despite the common lineage, the two people do not meet eye to eye and is in fact constantly going after at each other’s throat since the time we can remember. Pardon the somewhat harsh depiction of the conflict but Jews and Arabs should be made more aware of their common ancestry and use this knowledge to foster more understanding and amity amongst them. Their age-old conflict seems to be ethnical in character yet in truth, they share the same ethical roots (despite the more apparent territorial causes of the wars between the two sides). This is to me a monumental irony.

With this Israel’s celebration of a soccer goal by an Arab, we could only hope that lasting peace and understanding would be hastened in the middle-east region and stifle any explosion of animosity on a global scale. That region had always been a sleeping time bomb and if the world won’t give it proper attention, in order to resolve the quarrels that had seen the bloods of thousands and thousands of men, women and children wasted on the tarmac of hate and dissension, it might soon become the flashpoint of a much graver disturbance, in a scale that can disturb world peace.

Sports then I realized can be a tool for peace and understanding. Let there be more sports in the world therefore.

A Road Finally Ends On Terri

2005-03-28T08:35:00.000+08:00

Terri’s parents finally ran out of legal remedy as the highest judicial body in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court once again dismissed their appeal for lack of jurisdiction. The Supreme Court just couldn’t reprove the findings of the lower courts in Florida and with this, Terri may really have to go in a few days from now.

We now see perhaps the end of the road for this decade long debacle to keep Terri alive and while she still breathes this earthly wind as we speak now, I can already hear the fat lady sing.

I could not already articulate so much farther into the detailed aspects of the Terri case because everything about it has already been discussed and scrutinized by lawyers, judges, doctors and congressmen to the hilt and yet it all those still come to the same boil, that is, whether or not Terri desire to live further or not.

If we asked: Would Terri desire to go on living tied to a bed and mostly unaware of her surroundings? We did not exactly hear any categorical answer from her (except for her husband’s pronouncement to this effect) but many of us have tried to answer this question for her. Some of us said that living in that condition is not living anymore and it would be better for her to die in dignity than prolong her sufferings. I do feel also at some point that death may give her a much-needed escape from this cruel ordeal. Some of us on the other hand said that Terri may not die on her own accord being contrary to her catholic background. I also believe that life is such a sacred thing that it shouldn’t be taken away unless all things fail.

We all have the answer for her yet we are not really certain what was in her mind, or what is in her heart right now. In fact, she may have no mind anymore as we speak.

I have read thoroughly the more salient details of the Terri case and to tell you quite frankly; the facts are so enormous that it wouldn’t fit into this blog page.

With the end closer at hand, I could not help but opined that the Terri case should have been a case for hope, hope of something positive to come, hope that she might still be rehabilitated fully or partially, hope that given a few more months to live something good might happen, hope that earlier diagnosis was a mistake after all, and even hope that miracles so happen. Hope is a good thing and in fact, without hope existence in this world is much lesser than what it is.

This may sound rhetorical at the most, but this is what’s seems to be left of what could be said and done about Terri.

Winds of Change Spreads to Kyrgyzstan

2005-03-28T08:30:00.001+08:00

Demonstrators in the streets of Bishkek had days ago sent packing to a Russian exile its bedeviled President Askar Askayev through yet another “people power” type of revolution. The people power phenomenon continues its stride towards more freedom and democracy in the world long after the Philippines had its own bloodless street revolution.

All is not that well in Bishkek after the departure of President Askayev where rival politicians there struggle to fill the power vacuum that soon followed. Despite of this, the former status quo in Kyrgyzstan has already been set aside in favor of a new order and we only can hope that the changes there are all for the better and none leading to the spitefulness of totalitarianism that had once ruled there.

After the success of the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine some months ago and the palpable results of mass uprising in Lebanon, we see now another step towards more freedom and democracy in Kyrgyzstan and the whole world, especially the western powers, should give proper attention to it so that whatever gain that was achieved there in the name of freedom will not be lost again.

The Universality of Jesus Christ

2005-03-25T20:10:00.000+08:00

In these days of Lent, I could not help but empathized with the occasion, as I likewise bring myself before the solemnity of faith, in the manner that I see fit. In this connection, let me present to you an article that I have read some years ago in an issue of Newsweek Magazine. It was titled “The Other Jesus” and was written by Kenneth L. Woodward in the March 27, 2000 issue of the said magazine. I have been a voracious reader of many periodicals in the past---both local and international---and of all the articles that I have read, this one turned out to be the most memorable for me and the one that I have especially kept not only because it was about faith and religion (which magazines like Newsweek and Time rarely venture into), but mainly because it was a very informative and insightful piece of writing. There is something about this article that I could not point to, which is the reason why I always go back to it every now and then, every time I go rummaging through old issues of magazines and newspapers. I don’t know why I always do these things. Delving into old papers and documents had become an annual ritual for me that without doing it even for once, my year is not complete. I like the feeling of going through old things that I have piled in boxes and huge envelopes because they almost always remind me of past things that endear to me, that I could go all day excavating through old books and photographs and the dust coming from them gives such a unique and amorous scent. This year, at this particular point in time, when the kids are mostly home for the school break and summer provides a lot of empty hours for empty pleasures, I went backtracking again, through piles of old magazines and found this one magazine that contained the article that became my favorite of all time.

Due to copyright restrictions, I won’t be able to present here the verbatim content of the article “The Other Jesus” but I am giving you the synopsis, as best as I could. The online archives section of the Newsweek Magazine have this article stacked but it isn’t free. If you have online subscription to it, you’ll have free access to past issues.

In Catholicism, our Lord Jesus Christ is revered as the Son of God, the most recognized member of the trinity and He is the Redeemer of Mankind. In Pope John Paul’s own words, “Christ is absolutely original and absolutely unique. If He were only a wise man like Socrates, if He were a prophet like Muhammad, if He were enlightened like Buddha, without doubt He would not be what He is (today).” The Gospel Christ is the most well-known personage of the Messiah and many of us had learn to know Him as the man who was born of a virgin, who healed the sick and made the blind see; One who brought back to life a man who had already gone dead; who once walked on water and calmed the storms in the sea; and who gave His life to humanity in order that the sins of the world may be taken away. This is the Lord Christ, as we know him.

But Jesus Christ is by Himself a universal icon that is also accepted and embraced by many other religions of the world.

For instance, Jesus Christ is one of the most revered prophets in Islam and His name is mentioned in the Quran in the most respectful of manner. Moslems fully believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary through a miraculous birth under a palm tree and that he had already spoken words when he was still an infant to the effect that He was indeed sent by God. What was a little unusual is that when there came a time that many doubted the birth of Jesus by a virgin, many Moslem scholars came to the front in order to defend and affirm this miraculous birth. If in the Gospels Jesus Christ was crucified and died on the cross, to resurrect three days later, the Quran on the one hand declared that He did not die at all and was in fact saved by Allah before He was crucified and was ascended directly to heaven. Moslems of all sects believe that Jesus Christ is the one prophet that will come back when the end of the world becomes near and will defeat the anti-Christ. To them, among all prophets and messengers, only He and Mary were untouched by Satan.

In Bhuddism, many Zen practitioners see both Jesus and Buddha as brethrens in their quest to spread the teaching of “universal love”. Parallels in their lives are reiterated as they were similarly born in a miraculous manner to chaste women, and both left home for the wilderness and were tempted by a Satan figure. Like Jesus, Buddha also work wonders and preached compassion, selflessness and altruism and had challenged the religious establishments pertaining to his time. A Russian anthropologist had once postulated that Jesus had one time in His life paid a visit to a Buddhist seminary in Bhuttan and His short sojourn there was even recorded in one of the documents written by monks there. These “findings” has gone largely unconfirmed of course, but this was clearly an attempt to inculcate the person of Jesus Christ into the context of Buddhism.

In Hinduism, Jesus takes the form of a legendary shaman that once journeyed to India and learned the ways of attaining god-consciousness. Many Hindus are drawn to the figure of Jesus as an image of compassion and non-violence—virtues that are taught in Hinduism. For them, Christ-consciousness, Krishna-consciousness, and God-consciousness are one and the same thing. If Jesus Christ had propagated the singular teaching of “Love thy neighbors”, Hindu philosophy adheres to the notion that says, “You and I are the same things.”

Jesus Christ as a revered icon is a more complicated affair in Judaism because for one, Christ had challenged its very norms and principles when He was here on Earth. For generations, the teachers of Judaism had tried to isolate Jesus Christ as a trivial revolutionary that spoke of heresy and religious rebelliousness and had caution every Jew to distance from Him. But in time, many reformists in Judaism had started to accept Jesus as an “admirable teacher” and one who personifies the sufferings and redemption of the Jewish people, through many struggles like the Holocaust and statelessness. And besides, Jesus Christ was a Jew Himself and that fact is undeniable by itself and therefore, Judaism remain to have a claim on His greatness.

This is the “Universal Jesus”; a figure that transcends not only geographical partitions but also penetrates the restrictions brought about by the differences of faiths in this world. He may not be seen in the same exact breath by every religion in this world, but a closer examination shows that He had become so revered by many that not only Christianity has a claim on Him, but also Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and even Judaism. All great religions of the world embrace Him as a religious icon, one way or another, in their own respective ways.

IT’S THE WORST TIME FOR CHINA TO GO WAR SHOPPING

2005-03-23T08:35:00.000+08:00

If the European Union would eventually lift it’s 15-year arms ban against China (as it starts a 25-state summit in Brussels) that would be a minor miracle. But then, miracles always happen. With the passage of China of the anti-secession law targeted against Taiwan, the United States had doubled its emphasis and upped the pressure on Europe not to sell those war toys to China. It was just a bad time for the Red Dragon to pass war legislation like the one it enacted especially for Taiwan last month; especially now that they are buzzing on Europe to lift its arms embargo against it. It’s like knocking one’s own head with a hammer. The echelons in the China parliament should have been more cautious and should have maneuvered to veil its intent by delaying any war-like move.

Now, EU may really need the money coming in from the all-too-rich arms market of China and may still lift the arms embargo but then the United States is vehemently stalling them by threatening to renege on its commitment to provide licenses for crucial technology transfers. And the United States had made it clear that it will retaliate against Europe not only by disallowing technology transfers but also by other means. We could only ponder what these other “retaliations” come in the form of.

So EU may have to weigh its options carefully by calculating the ups and downs of every choices that is presented before it. Sell arms to China and lose technology input or to hell with new technology and gain big dough from China. Its elementary mathematics on its hands but surely, it got its hands so full and a major headache to contend.

Free market is so good so that if Europe wants to sell, it must be allowed to sell by all means and if China wants to buy, then let it buy. But we are talking here of arms sales and it's not always the same thing. Just recently, tension had increased across the Taiwan Straits. I bet that if push comes to shove in that area and war emanates from it, EU might be blamed for everything. Besides one of the most certain consequences of major arms input to China is the altering of the balance of power in the Asian region and we know all-too-well that it’ll be bad for world.

What’s the worse time to pass an anti-secession law? China should have known it by now.

NO FEEDING TUBE FOR TERRI DESPITE CONGRESS' HELP

2005-03-23T08:31:00.000+08:00

Despite the rushed legislation that Congress had enacted to help prolong Terri Schiavo’s life, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia ruled that the appeal system could not interfere with the rulings of the state courts in Florida, especially on the manner of proving or disproving facts that was already determined there. And so therefore, the appeal of Terri’s parents was ruled out to be without merit.

In legal procedures, appeals of lower court decisions should not question the facts that was already determined beforehand and should only question the propriety of judgments like for example if the judge had erred so gravely by disregarding or misinterpreting evidences presented therein---this kind of error is termed as grave abuse of discretion. Appeals can also be had if the judgment of the lower court appears to be unconstitutional. Appeals could not be instituted on the premise of discovering or rediscovering new facts because presentations of evidences are not allowed on appeal.

I have not read yet the full order denying the appeal of Terri’s parents but on re-appeal, they should changed the tenor of their petition to one that will address probable errors of judgment like for example by averring that the judgment of the lower courts in Florida was not supported by sufficient evidence, on the premise that the desire of Terri not to go on feeding tubes was not established reasonably.

Trends however are against the wishes of Terri’s parents because every court there is in town had favored Terri’s husband from day one. Polls in gathered by CNN shows 56% of respondents agreeing to the removal of the feeding tubes while merely 36% were against it. The rest was indecisive.

Terri’s parents are now on the process of re-appeal and we may still go on watching over this real-life drama that is unfolding before our very eyes.

THE HEAT IS ON IN ENGLISH FOOTBALL

2005-03-23T08:30:00.000+08:00

Who would have thought that Manchester United Manager Sir Alex Ferguson would one day be given some brash treatment? The chief executive of the very successful Old Trafford soccer team, Mr. David Gill, made public his sentiments lately that Ferguson is not untouchable after all and he is completely “sackable”. This may hurt some pride and let focus be in disarray now that Manchester United still has the chance of catching-up with league-leading Chelsea, no matter how slim it is. Players tend to be discouraged if their beloved coaches feels gloomy and burdened.This Old Trafford team is apparently so successful in the past that it hasn’t failed to win a Premier League title at least once in every couple of season. If it falters in its run to overcome Chelsea this season, this’ll be its worst run in a long while.

This apparent picking on the English soccer great Ferguson was sparked by 100% slump in profits for the first half of the year. Reports went out that this year’s earnings for the first half of the season was merely £12.4 million, down from £26.8 million over the same periodlast year . David Gill might have that owners’ mentality that coaches always take the brunt for a team’s misfortune, when we know that this is not so. Teams go down through many other factors, like spoiled players or uninspired playing.

David Gill may just be expecting too much from a team that is doing relatively good despite the lost of many of its star players like David Beckham, Skolgaer and Barthez through transfers. What it is now is a team full of youth in Ronaldo, Rooney and Van Nilstelrooy and no matter how talented these young guys are, they still need to mature and aged in a very competitive atmosphere like the English Premiere League. Gill is a little overarching and if Manchester United loses Ferguson, it may take in more losses for it would completely alter the look and feel of the Old Trafford team now that David Beckham is dancing tango in the Spanish Primera Liga. Fans may distance themselves from Manchester United all the more if Ferguson decide to leave. What a bad time to have bad tongue and be tactless.

Terri’s Life May be Prolonged With Senate Legislation

2005-03-21T12:12:00.000+08:00

Just hours ago, the United States Senate had just passed a bill that would allow the replacement of the life-saving feeding tube removed from Terri Schiavo last Friday. This latest development in the long-running debate on the issue of Terri Schiavo’s condition favors pro-life advocates. There is one remaining problem however. Congress is still grasping to form a proper quorum to respond positively to this Senate move, as many Democrat legislators were dilly-dallying to act on this Republican-initiated legislation. According to a leading Democrat legislator, the Republican is using the issue as a pawn in its earnestness to please its conservative allies. Without a corresponding legislation from Congress, the bill will not become a law.

White House spokesman Scott McLellan however made it clear that “we’d rather err in life’s favor”, if ever there would be mistake in this particular Republican initiative. President George Bush, the main man in the GOP, has returned to the capitol from a break in his Texas ranch, in order to sign the bill anytime it becomes ready. The next hours this day is crucial to Terri’ Schiavo’s life since she had already missed two meals due to the stalling of the Democrats and may miss more if quorum in the House of Congress is not forthcoming soon.

The proposed bill does not contain specific language that would order the restoration of the feeding tubes that will help prolong Terri’s life for that would be tantamount to the constitutional prohibition on bill of attainders, or the passing of ultra-special laws that would benefit merely a certain person or class of persons. Instead, the said legislation would only allow the parents of Terri to seek injunctive action in the higher courts in Florida and this injunctive move would of course order the retention of the life saving apparatus on Terri pending the resolution of the appeal. Of course, this goes to say that the law would allow the parents of Terri to make an appeal to the Florida state courts.

If passed, the proposed legislation that would give Terri’s parent to apply for temporary injunction does not however ensure that Terri may be allowed to go on tube feeding from now on. If the courts could still prove that Terri had really intended to refuse further medication while on a vegetative state, then her wishes will be respected. The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled in Cruzan v. Director that the constitution allows a person to refuse medication as a general right emanating from the Fourteenth Amendment of the constitution. Although in the Cruzan case the Supreme Court voted in favor of the restoration of the life-saving apparatus of the patient (when it wasn’t sufficiently established that Cruzan had indeed made known her intention to refuse medication), it affirmed however that whenever there is enough evidence that a person desires to refuse medication through a will or any form of documentation and recording, then that right and desire should be respected.

The constitutional right to refuse medication in the United States does not however validates the also-controversal issue of physician-assisted suicides which led to the conviction of “Doctor Death” himself, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, in 1999 for his aiding of a number of clinically-ill patients in committing “painless” suicides between 1994 and 1998. Refusal of medication is deemed to be a “passive” way to die while Kevorkian’s methods is an “active” mode of killing and therefore still considered as murder.

In the Philippines, there is no such constitutional right “to refuse medication” even when one is in vegetative state and our criminal laws prohibit suicides and anyone who assist in these suicides would be complicitly named as conspirators to suicide and will be penalized gravely by substantial imprisonment. Our constitution only has this to say about life: “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty and property without the due process of law.” Our Revised Penal Code even punishes those who would not help a mortally wounded person in some isolated areas.

If Terri’s case happens in the Philippines, any person who would take out the feeding tube of the victim, even when the victim desires it, that person will be guilty of murder or complicity in suicide.

The Pacman Is Back To Square One

2005-03-20T17:21:00.000+08:00

Perhaps, Erik “Terible” Morales has heard the advises of Mr. Al Mendoza, the Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist which wrote that in order for Morales to escape virtual defeat in the hands of Filipino southpaw Manny Pacquiao, he has to take in Angelo Dundee as his trainer. At most, Angelo Dundee must have not been in Morales’ corner this afternoon when he bloodied Pacquiao’s countenance on the way to 12-round unanimous victory, but to be sure Morales did what Mr. Dundee would most probably advise any fighter facing a boxer like Manny Pacquiao and that is, to keep out of punching range, to move and glide, to dance away and never engage in furious exchanges of blows.

Angelo Dundee was a main man behind the success of Muhammad Ali and its no wonder that the greatest boxer of all time dances like a butterfly and stings likes a bee. In Al Mendoza’s book however, Mr. Dundee is most remembered for crafting the successful comeback of Sugar Ray Leonard from a long five-year hiatus in order to beat Marvin Hagler. Leonard did this rare feat by “not mixing up with the guy”.

In the early rounds of the Pacquiao-Morales fight this afternoon, it looked like Manny Pacquiao was dictating the pace and keeping Morales out of range; staging quick rampages that somehow made Morales take steps backward. Morales on the other hand was doing the right thing by creating enough distance between him and Pacquiao and treating the fight like the mental fighter that he is. In the next half of the fight, the Pacman got basically tired of running after “Terible” and with blood spurting from a bad cut ihe suffered in the head---gravely disturbing his peripheral view---he just run out of punches that judges couldn’t give him the win. In summary, Pacquiao could have won the fight if Morales had decided to a brawl, a no-holds barred punching extravaganza. But it didn’t turn out that way.

If Manny Pacquiao overcame the all too stealthy Morales, he would have been queued for the super-featherweight title fight against Juan Manuel Marquez, another Mexican whom he had drawn last year in a non-title encounter. But for now, he would have to treat everything like he is just starting over and slowly climb towards title contention again. It has been done before by boxing greats like Sugar Ray Leonard and Luisito Espinosa; there should be no reason why he can’t lick his wounds for now and after that, start training his sight on the title once more, and go back to rigid training.

There is one thing I see as the Achilles heel of Manny Pacquiao and that is the somewhat unfamiliarity he has to this super-featherweight division that he had gone up to---he is fighting not in his natural weight. When he started as a professional boxer, he was a bludgeoning flyweight eating up every opponent on his way, until he moved to being a junior featherweight and had similar success. But now he is showing his wares in the super-featherweight division and he fares miserably. I know of course that pro boxers nowadays almost always go up in weight divisions but what I have observed in Pacman’s case was that the shift was too fast for comfort. You know in scuba diving, when one is underwater, one is advised not to rise to the surface of the ocean so fast because the abrupt changes in water pressure will harm the body gravely and may lead to death. That’s what I felt when Pacquiao decided to slug it out with guys who were natural in heavier weight divisions. Guys there are taller, their bodies wider and their reach longer. Maybe, it will take sometime for Manny to get used to the super-featherweight division that he has chosen to fight in and by then, he’d be so successful in it that he would just mow down every opponent along his way. But for now, he needs to make time agree to his choice of a heavier weight boxing division. He needs to make the fruit ripen naturally and not seek its sweet nectar through artificial means.

A Passage To India

2005-03-19T18:35:00.000+08:00

E.M. Forster’s novel “A Passage To India” is a stirring examination of the British colonial adventure in India in the early part of the last century and it wasn’t to be a surprised that the movie adaptation of this should echo the same sentiments. In our territory, we were exposed to copious writings that lament Spain’s often-cruel stranglehold of the Philippines but only the compatriots of the stricken land---the Filipino freedom fighters themselves---had penned them all. In this epic movie however, we are offered a rare glimpse of what colonialism is all about, in everything that is good or bad about it, in the eyes of the colonizer’s own subjects.

David Lean achieved what other great film helmsmen hasn’t by capping his nearly half a century long film career with “A Passage To India”, a reasonably huge saga of racial conflict set amongst the gigantically colorful background of Indian society and culture, in a time around the birth of a nation.

In this movie, a younger Judy Davies essayed the role of Adela Quested, an English maiden on a trip to India to meet her fiancée Ronny Heaslop, the British Magistrate of Chandrapore, a locality of India. She was accompanied by her fiancee’s mother, the aged but still elegant Mrs. Moore played by no other than the great English dame Penny Ashcroft. When the two finally arrived in India, Adela and Mrs. Moore became instantly fascinated with the vibrancy of the Indian way of life as they glided through the marketplaces of the mystic streets of Chandrapore. It is perhaps due to this newfound fascination that one night, Mrs. Moore went to feel the cool rural breeze and strolled too far from where she was until she had found herself inside a mosque. At that time, an Indian muslim, one named Dr. Aziz, has just ended his dusk prayers and was surprised to see Mrs. Moore entering the mosque in a white sleeping gown (Later on, Dr. Aziz would mention to Richard Fielding—a Britisgh functionary where the two women were staying---that at first she thought Mrs. Moore was a ghostly apparition.) Dr. Aziz frantically informed Mrs. Moore that she shouldn’t be in that part of the mosque since she was a women. This particular scene gives the viewer a healthy prelude to the clash of two cultures—between that of in India and the English ways---and how each one is separate and not privy at all to each other. Mrs. Moore of course apologized and this untoward meeting between the two led to a genial companionship, although it was a friendship that was deemed to be short-lived; as we were about to find out later on.

Without so much of a prelude, Dr. Aziz invited both Adela and Mrs. Moore to go sightseeing through the rustic Chandrapore countryside, more particularly to the renown Marabar caves, a huge cavern underneath a gargantuan rock formation that became world-famous not for anything much except the mysterious echoes that can be generated when one shouts into its dark spaces.

It turns out that in order to “enjoy” the strange echoes, the tourist has to make a lengthy trek far deep into its darker alleys and to this, Adela and Mrs. Moore had agreed to walk into them. The reverberating echoes within the walls of the cave and the tremendous discomfort brought about by the darkness inside it had caused so much distress to Adela that she panicked and scurried outside, bruising and injuring her in that frantic getaway from the strangeness of the echoes. The British Magistrate fiancée of Adela had eventually taken note of this and immediately ordered for the arrest of Dr. Aziz. The whole commotion in the cave has led many to believe that Aziz has attempted to rape Adela and a full-blown trial soon followed. Dr. Aziz of course cried foul and bitterly denied these purely trumped-up charges and called for the testimony of the refined and amiable Mrs. Moore whom he believes would reliably tell the truth. But to the consternation of Dr. Aziz and his counsel, the court was informed that Mrs. Moore could not give her side of what really happened that fateful day in the Marabar Caves because she was already on her way to England aboard an intercontinental ship. Dr. Aziz’s counsel smelled something fishy going on and had concluded right there and then that Mr. Heaslop, Adela’s fiancée, had deliberately sent Mrs. Moore away in order to hide the truth behind the whole fiasco and to ensure the conviction of Dr. Aziz. The judge berated Dr. Aziz’s counsel for his protestations and told him to refrain from saying agitated remarks or be thrown out of the courtroom and be barred from participating in the trial. To this, the said counsel suddenly stood up and bellowed to the judge “There is no trial! You are not trying any case! This is a farce! You and I are both slaves!” and then he took off his lawyer’s black robe and stormed out of the courtroom. Outside, he imbibed the crowd eager for the outcome of the case with anti-British sentiments by shouting repeatedly “We want Mrs. Moore!”

Before there could happen a potential uprising from the Indian populace in the city of Chandrapore over the arrest of Dr. Aziz (which many Indians there had seen as the result of British racial prejudice and discrimination against the natives), the trial ended on a turnabout testimony from Adela herself. When called to the witness stand, Adela broke down after a furious questioning and finally told the whole truth about the incident in the Marabar caves, to the effect that Dr. Aziz did not in any way tried to rape her but instead she had injured herself mostly due to her own undoing. Aside from that, in what turned out to be the most memorable scene in the movie, Adela told the court that she and Mr. Heaslop were recently engaged despite of her telling him that she don’t love him anymore. And that she just felt compelled by social norms to agree to her engagement to the British Magistrate. This had caught the crowd virtually off-guarded and even the judge was tongue-tied upon hearing this unsolicited and inconsequential confession of Adela. Mr. Heaslop of course shrunk in his seat and his head got bowed due to the embarrassment.

In the end, Dr. Aziz was acquitted and he became an instant hero in Chandrapore as a parade throughout the city was organized in his honor. The movie ended with Dr. Aziz contentedly practicing his profession in the northern Indian region of Srinagar, a silent but picturesque town whose ground are mostly covered by snow and its hills and valleys are splendid to the sight, as crystal clear lakes there shine like mirrors in purity and calmness.

The film “A Passage To India” effectively captured the emotional renderings of the E.M. Forster novel and reiterated its concern for the kind of racism that the author believed to have been apparent during the decades long British colonization of India. Actually, the film gained mixed reviews from film critics all over when it was released. Time Magazine described it “a rare triumph” while not a few noticed how it fared miserably with earlier works of David Lean. Despite of its eleven Oscar nomination in 1984, it only garnered the Best Supporting Actress trophy for Peggy Ashcroft and the Best Musical Score award for Maurice Jarre.

In my honest to goodness point-of-view, “A Passage To India” may not matched the aesthetic values of “Lawrence of Arabia” but how could one expect any director to top what “Lawrence of Arabia” had achieved considering now that it is regarded as one of the three or four greatest films ever made, right there at the top with “Citizen Kane”, “A Birth of A Nation” and “Casablanca”. To be sure, it lacks the solid characterization of early Lean films like “Bridge of The River Kwai” but it somewhat made up for this weakness by showcasing an excellent cinematography and sharp camera focuses. In “A Passage To India”, just like in “Lawrence of Arabia”, the viewer would feel immediately that no shot was wasted and that the film editor had painstakingly selected the scenes with masterful precision and that by itself a rare feat in a time where most films are well-photographed in just a few scenes but so-so in the rest. And to top that, the great production design applied in the film had effortlessly captured the subtlety and nuances of colonial age India that even though the film was shot in 1984, one feels like being brought back in time many decades into the past. If one did not know that the film was actually made in 1984, you would have thought that “A Passage To India” was made in the early decades of the last century. That was how factual and realistic this movie had appeared to be.

To me David Lean is the father of modern film from where most notable filmmakers nowadays had learned their craft. The influence of David Lean is always apparent in films by well-celebrated directors like Bernardo Bertolucci, Brian de Palma, Oliver Stone and even more commercial film helmsmen like Steven Speilberg, Michael Mann and Robert Attenborough. Sir David Lean is somewhat underrated in this manner because many directors today always credit their influences to Akira Kurosawa, as if they are ashamed to admit to idolizing a westerner like them. In truth almost all modern films---from Indiana Jones to Star Wars, from Gladiator to The Lord of the Rings, from The Godfather to Goodfellas, from Platoon to Born On The Fourth of July, from Rocky to Kramer Vs. Kramer---has all the markings of the many techniques used by David Lean in his earlier works; those rolling shots of scenic backgrounds, well-focused head shots, and the dynamic camera positioning are often replicated and duplicated in every modern film today, and these kinds of shots remind us always of the genius behind David Lean. He should be hailed as the greatest filmmaker of all time.

If you had enjoyed other David Lean’s movie like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Dr. Zhivago”, your life ain’t complete without seeing this one.

Fences.

2005-03-18T08:30:00.000+08:00

Yesterday afternoon, I was watching the replay of a Philippine Basketball Association game played between Alaska Milk and Ginebra San Miguel in an out-of-time venue when I began to notice that the bleachers in the basketball gymnasium where the game was being played have steel fences on them. For certain, this is not really something that should surprise me but I have gotten use to watching PBA games in more modern venues in Manila where fences are not in anyway used to divide variably-priced seats (the closer the seat to the court, the higher price one pays for it.) that seeing those metal dividers had instilled some deep thought in me.

I wondered in my mind why those steel fences are needed in some modern basketball gymnasiums and the probable answer to this mental query of mine is of course to prevent game patrons from unduly relocating from one place to another—usually from an area farther from the basketball court to a nearer one. Then I asked, have we as a people became most inclined to cheat even on such trivial matter as seatings in a basketball game that fences or divisions are made necessary to control these unholy notions? I ask if this ugly notion really exist amongst us because for one, I have yet to witness anyone doing such act although I have been in many live basketball games in the past, including the Araneta Coliseum in Cubao and Cuneta Astrodome in Pasay. Decades ago, when our economy was in deeper trouble and we were still somewhat backward in outlook and attitude, I would not have been asking these questions or if for one, we were some backyard countries like Afghanistan and Rwanda (I don’t mean to debase these countries, hope I am clear on this).

What I saw in that PBA game every time the camera pans towards the bleachers is the sight of human beings fenced like they were chickens behind wire fences. And every face I saw there is deemed to be so untrustworthy that they have to be held back deliberately by a formidable division. Some of them held the wire fences while watching the game and the sight evoked to me the unseemly image of men without freedom. To think, they are indeed without freedom, economic freedom for that matter, for if they were only able to pay for the better seats, they would not have to suffer those fences. I wanted to reach out to them and free them from that unsightly situation—only if I was a millionaire and able to buy them better seats. But I am not affluent and in fact, I would have suffered those same fences if I felt like watching a basketball game because surely, I might as well have not afforded those pricey seats at courtside. But one thing I am sure of, I do not have to be fenced in order that I remain in the seat of my consignation, in accordance with the thickness or slimness of my wallet. I think these fences must be uprooted from every gymnasium there is in town for they are symbols of distrust and dishonesty. If many would cheat, the solution would be to apprehend them and throw them out of the venue or better still, drag them to the nearest friendly neighborhood police station and make them hold some other form of metal fences. But fencing people just in order for them not to cheat is a throwback to tyranny.

I wonder how much those seats costs and if they were cheap enough in order for any patron to just content himself or herself to watching the game with steel fences bothering his or her views. I might as well have watched the game on television where fences do not in any manner cover the view.

I may sound sort of overreacting but those steel fences tells us something sad and ugly about our society and the Filipino as an individual. Have we become so untrustworthy? Have we become rogue enough to always cheat on seats and perhaps on every other aspect of our modern lives?

We are a nation of fences. Houses are fenced. Offices are surrounded by high concrete walls. Hospitals are ringed or always enclaved. Even churches built high divisions around them. Schools, cafeterias, stores, markets and subdivisions are fenced. We see fences in ships and boats, in graduation ceremonies, in crime scenes, in concerts and live shows, in festivals and sportsfest, in public demonstrations, in presidential speaking engagements, in cinemas and stage plays---fences are everywhere.

There are wooden fences as well as steel fences. Sometimes these fences have barbed wires in them or some cracked bottles on its topmost portions. While some even carries electricity that is powerful enough to burn any one that has the misfortune to be caught in it.

If every individual starts trusting every other individual and when every individual can be trusted already, that’ll be the day that we need no more fences in our midst. If that day comes, nobody knows exactly.

Blog Review Series No. 4

2005-03-18T08:10:00.000+08:00

The Samuel Bilibit Diaries – A Blog Review
Authored by: Sam
Content Remark: Shows A Great Promise.
Graphical Features: Excellent Layout.

This early in its blog life---barely three months to this day---this reviewer could safely say that The Samuel Bilibit Diaries is a labour of love.

In fact when Criocksz G. was still in that crucial stage of choosing the name for this weblog, he had to scrutinize a long and protracted list of potential banner title that included such names as Katapusang Singgit sa Amang, Aping Daldal, Kanto Tiño, Sa lilim ng punong manga, Conversations with Jack Daniels, Blog Bath, Lamang Utak, Isipang Buntis, Panuhot, Careless Whispers, Blah blah blog, Sangplatitong Mani, Duha Singko, and Pasakalye and by this you could tell how this weblog author take his blogging seriously and that must be how every blogger should be.

Then Criockz G. became Sam when he chose “The Samuel Bilibit Diaries” as his blog title. The title came about when once he was reminded that when he was a child, his mom scolded him for being a constant wanderer, saying to him “Murag ka man si Samuel Bilibit” (“As if you we’re Samuel Bilibit.”). In one of his earlier entries, Sam explained the tale behind the Visayan mythological icon. In legend, Samuel Bilibit was cursed to walked the Earth until the end of time and many believed that to this day, he is still walking among us ---along the streets he strolls by us everyday and inside the speeding jeepneys he rides along with us, towards his never-ending journey.

Read more of the review...

America Is Not Paying Vietnam War Victims

2005-03-17T08:30:00.000+08:00

Earlier this month, a United States federal judge had dismissed a class suit instituted by mostly Vietnamese citizens over the U.S. use of the chemical known as Agent Orange in its war against the commies in Vietnam more than three decades ago. During the Vietnam War in the 1960’s, the U.S. Military used Agent Orange extensively by spraying these chemicals over great portion of Vietnam’s rural are in order to kill and defoliate forest coverings that are used by the communists as hiding places. The Vietnamese complainants claimed that by the massive use of Agent Orange, many Vietnamese rural dwellers were affected by its poisonous effect and became ill of numerous sicknesses ranging from diabetes to cancer. In studies made by many American universities, it was established that Agent Orange contained the chemical element known as dioxins, a highly lethal compound that is now banned from general use all over the world.

According to the ruling, the American chemical companies named in the class suit and the U.S. Military could not be held liable for the main reason that Agent Orange is not a prohibited war substance under any international law at the time of its use. This basically make the class suit devoid of any legal basis where there is no law violated, there is no crime committed. This to me amounts to escape of liability by the U.S. government by mere technicality.

Another reason for the dismissal of the class suit was that the U.S. government is immune from suit and its sovereignty could not be challenged without its consent. Meaning to say, the principle of state immunity does not allow any party to institute any action against the government on the precept that allowing these kind of suits could only interfere with the exercise of sovereignty or the functioning of the government. Simply told, governments could not be charged by any crime or tort for this would only disturb their main task of governing the state.

Under the present rules of war, Agent Orange is in no way included in the list of chemical weapons banned by the Geneva Convention on the rules and conduct of war, not even in the recent Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Basically, Agent Orange is by nature a herbicide use in agriculture and its use by the U.S. Military was never as a weapon of warfare but as a strategic utility to clear the enemy’s cover. There have been recent calls for amendments to the rules of war since many war experts had determined that the war today is fought in a very different manner compared to decades ago where warfare is not anymore subscribe to an army-versus-army conflict but is fought with unique form of enemies like terrorists and private soldiers of despots; and therefore items like passenger airplanes like the one used in the 9/11 attack on the world Trade Center in New York and agricultural products like Agent Orange could be treated as potential weapons of war, and should be regulated and monitored.

Yet even when the U.S. Government could not be sued for war decisions, in the light of the doctrine of state immunity, the federal judge should have examined the liability of American companies who manufactured Agent Orange, and awarded some form of compensation for the harmful effect of their product. If tobacco companies could be made to pay for the direct and indirect effects of cigarettes, then why not a company making agricultural chemicals? There is a strong basis to my suggestion since in 1984, seven companies that manufactured Agent Orange agreed to pay $180 million in compensation to U.S. veterans or their next of kin. I believe that based on this jurisprudential precedence, the Vietnamese complainants should be compensated for the ill-effects of Agent Orange use by the U.S. Military in Vietnam.

Unlike the Japanese Government feigning innocence over the Imperial Army’s abuses of comfort women, the United States government should have shown exemplary kindness and consideration by indemnifying Vietnamese citizens who have became seriously ill or died as a result of the indiscriminate use of Agent Orange.

FULL DISCLOSURE---“Much Ado About Nothing”

2005-03-16T21:00:00.000+08:00

I am not doing this because I am being made to do so at gunpoint. I am not compelled whatsoever to do this by anything except that I am intending to do this anyway in the near future, although it wasn’t in my mind before that this disclosure would have come so much sooner than I expected.

Just a month ago, Decrepit Old Fool had make a disclosure that he was in fact one of the contributors in the much-read site “The Zen Diaries” and was I glad for that disclosure? I felt just okay and thought much ado about nothing.

But this disclosure may leave a bad taste in the mouth of some, but I guess that may be inevitable.

When I started this web log----Where Now Is The Citizen On Mars?---I had conceptualized it as a political avatar with of course the attendant expression of my own socio-political opinions and see how readers react to it. As it progresses along, it was turning into a vibrant forum for the opinion of others instead of being absolutely the portal for my own worldviews. This progress is not entirely a bad thing to me. Moderating a forum may just be one way for me to help other bloggers express their own personal opinions of the world. In this light, I had even created segments like “The Blog Review” and “What Other Bloggers Are Fretting About” just in order to help ventilate the thoughts and meanderings of my fellow bloggers.

There is another thing to the conceptualization of this blog. I had patterned it to the very famous web log titled “Where’s Raed?” whose author writes in the screen name, Salam Pax. There is so much mystery in the person of Salam Pax and everyone reading this Iraq war-themed site had been asking all along who Salam Pax was and some even thought she was one American petite woman. I do not still have an inkling who Salam Pax is until now. Maybe someone could help me find out.

So I said, if a foreigner could make this kind of blog, and be world famous, I wondered if a Filipino like me could also do that? Do we have double standards here? I don’t believe so. If others can create this sort of thing, why can’t a Filipino like me do likewise? If you surf through the international blogscene, in America most especially, you can find a dime a dozen site that has mysterious authorship and still it thrives although most of these sites, upon public demand make some sort of public disclosure of their true authorship and some don’t even bother despite the urgings of many of its readers to disclose and yet, they continue to be patronized.

Now did I fool anyone? Did I intend in any way to maliciously mislead my readers? I do not think so. If you were my constant reader, my writings here are all temperate, rational and logical that I did not in anyway have posting that would create confusion and bewilderment. Now of course, you might say I have fooled you on my true identity. But as I explained earlier, that was screen names that I used---Major Tom or Thomas Rivera---just like Salam Pax. In the local blog scene, one of my most favorite blogger is XP, the operator of the highly-acclaimed blog EXPECTORANTS!!!. If you check this site, it has no personal profile to view and there is nothing there whatsoever to lead you to know more about the true identity of XP, although XP says that many had already known his true identity. But a newbie like me has no idea whatsoever. But I did not mind this and I continue to read Expectorants!!!---I guess that’s the prerogative of XP if she do not want his true identity known, I mean, caveat emptor---or buyers’ beware.

In fact, despite the screen name or my use of a secret identity, I have really intended to tell my real identity anyway later this year, like in June, and if many would have asked for it. But I have to tell these things to you now my fellow bloggers and I think it is just about the right time.

My real name is Y.B. Masdal. I am 32-years old residing in Zamboanga although I have been in Manila lately so that explained my previous area of consignation. I have four kids and I am Christian by conversion, upon a recent spiritual awakening. My other blogsite is known as “The Daily Prophet”, it is my personal web log.

Now you might be wondering why at times, The Daily Prophet comes here and comment? That may lead you to laugh or be aghast at me. A stalker of mine says it was perversion. The explanation is like this. It was exactly because of this stalker of mine named Lieutenant Dick that I made those comments in the name of The Daily Prophet, so that she would be a little taken out of sort if Major Tom was really The Daily Prophet, I did not want her to know of course, because exactly, she is my stalker even from the beginning. My comments here as The Daily Prophet was a desperate attempt to hide my true identity when I felt that Lt. Dick was starting to realize that Major Tom is The Daily Prophet himself. Lt. Dick is smart and by the way she is a female blogger that is so well known in the blogscene. We all know her and she hides sometimes as Lt. Dick, a screen name she invented just for me. You know, I felt special somehow that despite of her being such a well-known blogger, she had went down to such low level just in order to harass me. Whoah! Am I that special?

And besides, one of the blogs I frequent is the famous blog of Batjay and Mr. Nicanor David has created there some personas that interact with each other like THE GENTLE READER and PINSAN NI BATJAY and we all like that ven though we have an inkling that all along, it was Batjay that was making them interact with each other. It’s like an artistic expression and it works so well.

For propriety reason, I would not tell you who Lt. Dick really is but I have ample evidence of who she is. If you go to her new blogsite Where Now Is The Citizen On Neptune?, a spoof of Where Is Now The Citizen On Mars?, you wouldn’t miss knowing her true identity because the manner she write there is so eerily familiar. You would know immediately who she is, with all that fuzz about bloggers being plagiarists and having screen names and pseudonyms that you thought she own the blogosphere that she don’t want any blogger to use screen names. If Jose Rizal were a blogger now, she would even point him to the Spaniards because Jose Rizal has pseudonyms. She hates that. I don’t know why she thinks that I have used a screen name to deceive people when I did not in anyway did that. Oh, this one you should know. In one of the more famous blog here where I use to comment, my screen name Daily Prophet was misused by some “unscrupulous” manipulator that it was shown that the Daily Prophet had commented something when in fact I didn’t. I did not point out already the misuse there in order the issue to die down. But if she continues to misuse my screen names, hers would be misused too. You could tell that it was not I because my tone is usually respectful. If ever from now on you could see some comments in other blogs in the name of Major Tom or The Daily Prophet and its nasty, just disregard them because most probably, Lt. Dick is behind it.

Now I do not feel right apologizing but I will apologize just the same to you who might have felt something bad. Major Tom is just a screen name as well as Thomas Rivera and let’s admit it, in the blogscene, screen names are all abound. I am Y.B. Masdal.

In truth, I have great esteem and respect for my readers and many of you must have felt how I speak to you with enough candor and respect. I made sure that I help them get exposure and when they comment in this site, I make sure that I return their comments and visit their blogs and react also to their views and opinions, unlike other forum moderators who does not respect her readers by giving a visit and making comments to their blogs, even just a simple encouragement would have been enough. I am not like that and I make sure that my readers have the same attention. I have no prejudice and discriminate in favor of more famous blogs only. For me every blog is equally important in their own right and unique by its own. This Lieutenant Dick says in her blog that some sites are “plain gibberish and immaturity talks.” I mean, being gibberish and immature is not a crime and if a writer wants to be that way, that’s his or her own freedom of expression. Apparently, Lt. Dick is not only self-appointed blog censor, but she is also a self-styled dictator. You think she owns the local blogworld? I think we do not need censorship here and Lt. Dick must be brought down for interfering in the personal rights of other bloggers. And if she is brave enough, she should also make some disclosure like I did. I am sure she won’t and her name is not Roderick Ramos because Lt. Dick is a woman. If some Roderick Ramos actually appears, that’s always possible and can easily be done but I doubt it because we do not know anything about a certain Roderick Ramos in the blog scene and how come “he” knows many things about blogging. But as a Christian, let’s us just forgive her and ignore her disturbed soul. She’s a catholic-hater by the way and we just hope and pray that Satan can give her a colder room in hell when Judgment Day comes. But if she won’t let up, then I won’t let up also because I have top defend my self, my blogsites, and my life for that matter. Stalkers tend to be psychotic and God knows what they can do.

I will continue to use Major Tom despite you knowing that I am Y.B. Masdal in reality. My other blog The Daily Prophet, is entirely different from this forum site because it’s more personal and I want to make some healthy separation between Mars and The Daily Prophet site. I have other blogs and you can reach them by just checking the links in The Daily Prophet.

This disclosure is a little risky for me since many of you might shun me from now on but I assure you that I will go on even if I only have one reader a day because a reader is worth writing for like most of you guys here, you know who you are and I feel so blessed that my readers here are all intelligent, witty, rationale and smart souls who all have smart sites. If you check out all these people, you’d be so surprised how good they are although most of them are newbies like me. I hope you all stay guys. If you all have questions about me, feel free to ask.

Star Wars---Now A Darker Jedi Story

2005-03-16T08:30:00.000+08:00

Great news for those who had for once or twice, or even for many more times in the past, thought of themselves as Luke Skywalker and sway those laser swords like they were threading dangerously on Death Star.

George Lucas had announced some days ago that the final installment of the Star Wars prequel series would be released in the states as early as May. That would mean, we on the Asian side of the Pacific might be able to troop once more to every Dolby-enhanced theater within our reach sometime early June. If the wallets get fatter by that time, some of us may sneak into some THX premiere.

The title of the upcoming Star Wars movie is “Return of the Sith”, and Lucas described it as the “darkest” among all episodes, including the one where Darth Vader finally shredded his now-famous and dreaded helmet and got killed by his own son. What Lucas meant by this? Perhaps, the “Return of the Sith” may contain more doses of violence than we are used to get or maybe it contains now some sexual explicitness (considering Anakin gets to grow up into full adulthood here and get to marry Princess Amidala).

My take on this is that perhaps George Lucas has carved out a more serious and somber script for this new episode, meaning to say, the plots gets a lot of “tragedy” treatment and less of those wham-bang-thank-you-ma’am kind of action scenes that kids love the most. This may be both good news and bad news for every Star Wars soul out there. Bad news to those who have been accustomed to the fantasy-driven and adventure-packed previous episodes but good news to those who have grown mature enough to savor movies not by its graphical qualities alone but upon the “essentials” of movies like for example a compelling plot and good characterization.

All in all, Star Wars fanatics may just be gleeful enough that for the summer, they have something big to look forward to. I do not know if I can be called a fanatic but I have seen every episode (Well, who hasn’t?) not just once but at least thrice for every installment. For me, the storylines behind these sci-fi epic series evokes more than just the hero-and-villain/master-and-slave conflict; they actually run upon a whole ingenious concept of good and evil, where discipline and persistence and the belief “in the force” makes the Jedis more cunning and iconic as against the grandiosity of evil in the person of Darth Vader. It is the modern day depiction of man’s quest for justice and equality by pursuing the road less traveled (the Jedis seem to owned nothing but their clothes on) that in the end, the good of the “force” translate more than the power and wealth that the evil empire sought to claim for themselves but could not in the end. Star Wars is like any bible story---it’s the triumph of good over evil in this world.

Uranium Enrichment In Iran To Halt.

2005-03-15T08:30:00.000+08:00

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami issued a statement yesterday to the effect that for the meantime Iran would be ceasing its uranium enrichment program. He said: "We are ready to cooperate with the world to give more certainty that Iran is not moving toward the creation of nuclear arms."

This is the right way to go for Iran and certainly the world could learn a thing or two from this act of modesty and restraint from a country that is more known today as being part of the “axis of evil”. The world today takes a step forward towards a nuclear-free world, or at least a world far from the threatening hands of a nuclear holocaust. It may not be as big a step as we wanted it to be but at least, we could see now what “right direction” means for Iran and other so-called “rogue states”.

A day earlier, the international political scene was pleasantly surprised to hear that the United States was finally backing out of its opposition to Iran’s entry to the WTO. This was considered as a “major shift” on international policy considering that the United States had never been known to flip-flop with its agenda in the global scheme of things, not in the issue of terrorism and much more in the aspect of nuclear threat in the world today. But there it was, the United States condoning the wishes of its European allies to finally allow Iran membership into the world’s largest global economic grouping known as WTO. I should say also that the world could learn from this unexpected but greatly appreciated move of backing out by the all-powerful Uncle Sam.

When asked if Iran’s decision to stopped uranium enrichment was rooted on the U.S. backing off from its WTO opposition, President Khatami dismissed it as plain ridiculous and likened it to trading a lion for a mouse. He said that the reason for the halt in uranium enrichment was mostly based on moral grounds and nothing else. A senior Iranian official clarified that WTO membership is not really that important to Iran since aside from oil, its other main exports are basically insignificant items such as pistachios.

But I think, the Iranian official is just saying that in order to maintain any remaining leverage it has in its negotiation for more trade with Europe. One of its conditions for abandoning the nuclear program is increased exports quota of non-petroleum items to European countries and an enhanced technology transfer from Europe to Iran. Clearly, Iran is taking serious efforts to enter the global trade and to this, WTO membership is an inevitable prerequisite.

All in all, we hope that all is well that ends well. If we can urge a country like Iran to go nuclear-free, then perhaps countries like North Korea, India and Pakistan may follow suit. These countries should be ashamed of themselves and should instead emulate Iran and the United States for knowing how to take some steps backward in times when they are needed, and know that restraint and moderation is a major plus for world peace, and humanity in general.

Here We Go Again.

2005-03-15T08:15:00.000+08:00

In the song titled “Sonnet”, Richard Ashcroft of the highly commendable English alternative rock band “The Verve” crooned in its refrain these words:“here we go again and in my head it is done…”

"Sonnet" is one of the most affecting song I have ever heard and its sentimentality is made even more profound with the cunning way the guitar wailed in the background, set to a rhythm that is wisely unhurried and meaningfully scattered over its heartrending words, like rainfall on a tin roof. The song goes on to say that “nature has its way of warning me. Eyes open wide, looking at the heavens with a tear in my eye.”

When I heard the news about the jailbreak yesterday afternoon (as I was about to rest from a whole day of driving), I could not help but utter desperately in my mind the often-used phrase “here we go again”. Some of the 129 Abu Sayyaf members detained in Camp Bagong Diwa in the city of Taguig went amok shortly after dawn yesterday and staged a very violent jailbreak where three jail guards were instantaneously killed in the ensuing firefight. It was also reported that two of the breakers were slain shortly after. The incident was familiar and the story remains the same. Some jail guards felt a little lax for once and allowed a detainee to grab his firearm. How loose can security get to this sort of prisoners like the suspected members of the Abu Sayyaf?

The clock already stood at 11 PM last night but the crisis wasn’t over yet as negotiations finally broke down, in negation to the major headways gained earlier in the afternoon. Apparently, one of the latest requests of the detainees was unreasonable enough to wreck whatever compromise was agreed on beforehand. This particular “requests” was not mentioned in the latest newscast on TV last night. Earlier in the day, an accord for the surrender of the jailbreakers was reached and the compromise would have included “no bodily harm” to the surrenderees, respect for their human rights, speedy disposition of their cases, redress of their “grievances,” and access to the media after their surrender. Police Senior Superintendent Leopoldo Bataoil called the compromise a “win-win situation”. With three jailguards dead, the superintendent does not seem to appreciate fully well what winning truly means.

In my mind, our police have not learned fully from the past mistakes it had committed on the matter of detaining prisoners like these Abu Sayyaf suspects. Last year, eight escapees were killed while being pursued after 20 suspected Abu Sayyaf detainees staged a jailbreak in Basilan. In 2003, the Indonesian terrorist suspect Fathur Roman al-Ghozi made fools of his jailers by planning his escape from his very own cell using a slipped-in cellphone. How a cellphone could be in the hands of a high-profile detainee like Al-Ghozi evades my mind completely.

Jailguards should have known better this time considering that there are many occurrences in the past that tend to show that Abu Sayyaf suspects are almost always inclined to seek escape from prison, even at the most violent of manner. Since those prisoners weren’t ordinary criminals, as we usually know them, our police authorities should have treated them with paramount stringency and vigilance, short of putting them under maximum security. In that manner, not one of them could ever attempt to grab some jailer’s side arms, as each one would be clamp with heavy chains whenever they are out of their cell. We already know from past events that these terrorists are most inclined to do a Hannibal Lecter whenever a window of opportunity for escape presents itself. Not even when Dr. Lecter was clasped within tons of chains that his jailer could ever feel secure. The police should have treated them like the Hannibal Lecters that they always turn out to be.

Of course, this is not to encourage human rights abuses. With my suggestion of maximum security, these kind of detainees should of course be allowed ample time to convene with their counsels and visits from their loved ones under very guarded circumstances as well as the observance of all other rights and privileges the law gives to a person under detention for the commission of a crime. When their minimum rights have already been observed, every other security measure should be utilized to put a perfect clamp on them.

Blogging In The Free World!!!

2005-03-14T08:45:00.000+08:00

Last week alone, two blogging milestones have happened---upping the tempo of the pace bloggers have taken in recent months. The blogosphere is like a machine humming with so much power that when it finally runs, it could not control its own inertia. That’s how blogging is nowadays. There is a whirling pace within us that catches us somewhat off-hand not realizing what really happened until we see it actually happening. There seems to be no turning back now and bloggers all over the world should keep on pushing and pushing until we see the limit in sight---if there is such thing as a limit to blogging.

According to a news report from CNN, lawmakers and online journalists in America have most recently called on the Federal Election Commission, otherwise known as FEC, to keep its hands off political forums on the web like Wonkette.Com and FreeRepublic.Com. Fourteen members of the House of the Representatives have said that blogs foster a welcome diversity of viewpoints and they should be treated with the same stature and rights like common journalists have. Apparently, there was some move within the U.S. judiciary to classify these online political sites as political organizations, or something related thereto, which would make them the subject of election regulations, especially on matters of political contributions. In 2001, FEC had determined these online forums as not amounting to “coordinated political activity”, and therefore not subject to existing election regulations.

At times, people in the high-ups are just plain inadequate or perhaps just hopelessly lazy. How could they generalize so easily on matters like blogs and blogging and determine things like they are the same apple in the same basket. What FEC should have done is to examine each political blog one by one and find out whether or not they are of “concerted political activity” or not. I am sure that many political web logs are credible and legitimate enough to withstand any scrutiny although nobody could exactly discount the fact that some sites in the Internet may just as well be paid hacks and political mercenaries. Here’s an easy test, if a political web log starts to paste on their pages some segments that says “Bush Is My Man!” or “Gloria Ang Ating Bida” then who’s to doubt as to their being paid pundits? Would it take a genius to distinguish these things? I don’t think so.

The other blogging milestone I have referred to above was the issuance of a White House pass to blogger Garrett M. Graff, the 23-year-old writer for a web log known as Fishbowl D.C. Mr. Graff is said to be the first blogger ever to have been treated just like any regular journalist covering presidential activities and to be allowed inside the White House briefing room. When he was asked how it felt on his first day of coverage, he just said: "Our first impression this morning? As glamorous as the beat itself may be, there's little glamour to be found in the briefing room. The conditions of the briefing room, famously built over the old White House swimming pool, um, leave something to be desired."

Remember that name. Garrett M. Graff is making blogging history even as we speak now.

In the Philippines, we may still need to see some brave souls that will push the level of blogging by a step higher---just like in America. The first person to enter that Malacañang briefing room as a blogger journalist is surely to be remembered as a blogosphere hero and will be remembered in many years to come. Any volunteer?

Hybrid Cars : The Future of Transport

2005-03-12T08:41:00.000+08:00

In America today, there seems to be a major push for the use of alternative energy in cars and other motorized transport. A car that uses a combination of gasoline and fuel cell as power sources is termed as the “hybrid car”.

Three days ago, the Internal Revenue Service has announced that all purchaser of the hybrid car can avail of tax deductions that amounts approximately to within the $2000 figure. The tax relief can go as high as $4000 if the car purchased is powered solely by electric power.

This development may usher a completely new era in the way we transport ourselves through miles and miles of urban passageways and thoroughfares. Apparently, two facets of realities had called for the promotion of the use of the hybrid cars by the United States Government. One is the ever-rising prices of crude oil in the world market and the threatening climate phenomenon known as greenhouse effect.

On a transport that runs halfway by electric power, one can get more mileage per gallon of gasoline on a hybrid car and this means, less use of petroleum products that causes volume and volume of carbon dioxides to be spewed into the environment, thereby bringing more harm to the ozone layer and helping to invigorate global warming.

Are hybrid cars the future of modern transport? Most probably it is. Last year, sales of hybrid cars reached nearly 90,000 units and are predicted to rise to the figure of half-a-million units in eight years.

But despite of that, every aspect of the technology surrounding hybrid cars is not yet smoothened through the hilt and still has a long way to go. Consumer surveys are still collating information as to the reliability of these cars in terms of complaints received and problems encountered per 100 hybrid car sold. The usual snags include complaints on the limited stretch of miles it can reach per instance of use (interstate commute is unthinkable at this time) and the availability of parts and servicing centers.

Just this month, General Motors had caused the destruction of some 800 units of prototype models of EV1 electric cars that it had tried to test-market since the 1990’s. Slow sales and lukewarm response from the consumers had caused GM to decide the crushing of the said electric cars and the scrapping of the manufacturing unit that produced its parts and components. According to a GM spokesman, there is just not enough demand for a car that could merely run for 140 miles with each plugging into a home-installed electric recharger. This news shows that wide-acceptability of this mode of cars remains years away.

But GM’s EV1 is purely an electric car that has no gasoline component to it. The hybrid car on one hand combines the power generated by internal combustion in order to produce electricity that in turn, powers the transmission system of the car. Hybrid cars seems to be more promising with more mileage per gallon on it and without the often-annoying need to recharge it in some space-consuming plug-in contraption at home, unlike cars that runs purely on battery, like the EV1. And with the tax incentives, more and more buyers are wont to snatch it from car display centers across America and perhaps, in many countries all over the world.

The concept of the hybrid car is not entirely new to us. The MRT running through our avenues are powered in fact by electricity. Bullet trains that we see in Japan and Europe use electricity to course the magnetism that propels these amazing modern carriages to mind-numbing velocity. Submarines used by First World countries are now powered by a hybrid of diesel engine and nuclear power—just like aircraft carriers.

If OPEC remains adamant and continue to artificially propel oil prices just about every time, sending third world nations like the Philippines reeling into a spiral of crisis after crisis, then every soul should be praying that in the future, our cars should not need gasoline anymore, as well as our factories, power plants, aircrafts, ships and every mechanized thing there is to be found. OPEC should ought to note that. First World countries, with their huge and highly evolved economies, would most likely be immune from the effect of every oil crisis, or its effect on them would certainly be manageable. It is the poor countries that always get the bad rap brought about by the indiscretions of this group of international blackmailers known as OPEC.

OPEC ought to know that.

Cool Stickers.

2005-03-12T08:15:00.000+08:00

Speaking of cars, I was driving through Quirino Avenue when I suddenly got trapped in a familiar traffic bind. I turned on the stereo and America was singing "Sandman". I whistled through the song when suddenly my gaze caught the back of a van just in front of me and imbedded on it was the sticker with huge letterings that read: “DON’T FOLLOW ME. I’M LOST”.

I could not help but giggle inside of me and a grin was pasted on my face. It was the coolest and funniest car sticker I have ever seen. I wonder why I haven’t got that.

Reminds me of the Senator Miriam Santiago-Defensor’s take on stalking. I had thought why would the van owner think that I would be following him. He is just full of conceit and overly-aware I guess. I get to remind myself that the sticker was just meant to be a joke. Perhaps, he is really a kindred soul to humor me like that. It’s both funny and eerie I think. But at times, it ain’t funny no more. What would you feel if somebody goes on following you everywhere you go? I guess stalking makes our existence limited and our movement becomes too restricted. I guess the anti-stalking bill should be fast-tracked. Or perhaps we could buy more stickers that says, “DON’T FOLLOW ME. YOU ARE VIOLATING THE ANTI-STALKING LAW.”

Oh, this entry is a little bit mindless. You may not comment on it.