Pork Barrel, Napoles, blah, blah...

I was watching the news, and I was surprised that Mrs. Napoles surrendered to the government. What she did was anti-climactic to the opera unfolding before the country. She did not even try to elude the NBI and Police tracker teams the way Ping Lacson did when the warrant for Ping’s arrest was released by the court for his alleged involvement in the Kuratong case (Well, Ping was never caught; the government got tired), nor did she even try to do a Gloria Macapagal Arroyo wearing braces and other ortho-medical stuff (that made her look like Naruto or something) to elicit sympathies from the people…I mean, the surrender was plain anti-climactic.

She's complaining of head ache, high blood pressure, diabetes. That's what you get for having too much pork. If I'm in her position right now, I'd claim I have HIV-AIDS, Ebola Virus, Dengue, Malaria...just look at her, she's as healthy as a pork.

Her surrender to the president was understandable since she feared for her life. With her knowledge, she could destroy the careers of many politicians in both the houses of congress, officers in the executive department, local government executives, and the active and retied officers in the military. These people would do anything to keep their hold on power and their hands on their pork barrels and eliminating a fixer like Napoles is a cinch to them. With the width and depth of her web of corruption in the government, she knew she could not trust just anyone and surrender to the NBI or the Police would be a suicide. I mean either she could be ambushed, or she could be shot in the forehead for stealing a police escort’s gun. What are the chances.

Napoles’s web of corruption even extended to the Most Holy Catholic Church when it was found out that she had priests on her payroll. These priests even executed affidavits exculpating Napoles and her brother of charges of illegal detention. The priests added religious voodooism by saying that Benhur Luy (the whistle blower) was on a spiritual retreat.  I am sure these priests knew by head and by heart the Ten Commandments. Of course, everything can be bought now, even priests, may I say.

  Obviously, the monsignor had knowingly or unknowingly eaten unclean pork.

I am, with most of my countrymen and women, don’t like the special treatment being given to Mrs. Napoles. I understand her surrender to the president. The president is the only person who could protect her now and by accommodating Napoles, the president did well. What I could not understand is why she is not in behind bars now; she is in jail but in an air-conditioned office! If it’s about security, the president could appropriate the army special forces, the marines, the scout rangers, the Navy frogmen and even some of his presidential security guard to ensure her safety in jail as long as she stays in a cell like the maid she put to jail for qualified theft. I mean, aside for the technicalities of the law, it is pretty obvious that Napoles is guilty of plunder and perjury which one or both should land her to jail.

It’s an epiphany that she was detained in the jail where the maid she charged with qualified theft was also incarcerated. Of course, I heard she will be moved to first class accommodation either in Camp Bagong Diwa or in Crame. No special treatment here...well, shit happens.

  

Divine Intervention: A Book Review (sort of)

This is an interesting sci-fi novel that fringes on theology.  I was hooked on it.

Here's my synopsis:

Spaceship Walt Disney was sent out to space to find habitable planets for earth to colonize. They found a planet from a galaxy thousand of light years away from earth. They landed on the planet, called it Mandala, and established a colony that for 150 years being cut off from earth, evolved into a unique civilization. The most remarkable thing about them is that they developed a religion based on the journal of the Walt Disney's captain.

A communication was sent to earth a bout the success of the mission. Earth sent spaceship Mayflower containing the second batch of colonizers numbering 33, 000 cryogenetically suspended terrans. As they enter Mandala's orbit, the prime minister of Mandala saw the arrival of Mayflower as a threat to his government since the new colonizer would outnumber the original citizens. To stop this threat, the prime minister hatched a plan to crash the Mayflower.

There was a problem, Drew a deaf and mute boy who wears a digital communicator established contact with God while praying. God informed him that the "Earthies" had arrived. Drew unintentionally informed the prime minister of this knowledge, and the prime minister had no choice but to detain Drew in case the information leaked to the public which could complicate his plan.

Drew escaped and there ensued a battle between the city dwelling and the tribal, rastafarian Mandalans called the "Burnouts" that lived on the fringes of the city. The battle escalated into space when the Burnouts launched a primitive rocket, designed to intercept the Mayflower, which they also saw as a threat, with the intent of hi-jacking it so that they could use it to search for a planet of their own. The Burnouts was able to defeat the city dwellers because of the information that God had provided Drew on the location of the enemies position.

In outer space, Drew's father, a preacher and a minister, found out that the God which Drew was praying to was an old space probe launched by Walt Disney on Hades, one of the planets of the Mandalan system nearest to its sun. The probe landed on the planet which was pure silicon. When it landed, being an impurity to the silicon surface of the planet, it accidentally created circuits that after a one hundred fifty years became a silicon based sentient being that called itself God, a term it learned from drew's prayer.

The probe was shut down by the city dwellers space plane but before it was destroyed, it was able to link with the Mayflower transferring its consciousness into the ship and from then on called itself "Ship". The Prime Ministers plot was stopped and the truth was exposed.

Epilogue: The ship asked for the "Mayflower" so that it could also explore space on its own.

The idea of a probe acquiring sentience and evolving is not new. I have read and seen the original "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and it was here that I first encounter the idea of a space probe acquiring sentience when it interacted with something out there in outer space. In Star Trek, the protagonist was called VGER which turned out to be the evolved Voyager 6, the space probe launched during the 20th to explore the galaxies. Its primary program was to learn what is learnable. VGER threatened to destroy Earth but the crew of the USS Enterprise was able to reason with it because no weapons, Klingons or Federation, could stop VGER.

Anyway, back to Divine Intervention, the story was good. I was hooked on the plot. The science is not that difficult to understand (which, really in reading sci-fi, one doesn't really have to validate or verify).

What I was really impressed was how the story was able to connect religion and science.

Here's an excerpt from the Captain's Journal which the Mandalans referred to as simply the "Journal":

The truth is so simple, and yet i tremble as I put into words. On cosmological scale, the universe is symmetric in time. What we know of as God is simply the collective consciousness travelling opposite to our temporal orientation. God's realm is the unknowable future; everything that is real to him  remains only a possibility to us. Ironically, the reverse is true: The reality of our past remains unknown to God. And I see what the future holds for humanity. As our technology continues to advance we will eventually become godlike ourselves. Sooner or later our descendants will find a way to transfer themselves into immortal beings, perhaps in the form of pure energy, and they will survive the transition into the collapses of the universe. And then--the beautiful symmetry!--humanity will be the God, and today's God will be some alternate version of humanity, evolving backward in our temporal frame. I have no doubt that when we are God, we will guide them just as he is guiding us now.

Now, I gotta quit for this is way above and I need time to process this :-)

Rheumatism and the toilet seat

I was not able to go to church because my ankle was swollen, again. I have eaten too much peanuts while watching TV and add to that the mongo ( last friday's viand), and the togue okoys and other uric acid rich foods that all seemed harmless eaten at a small amount but all together added up, compounded to cause this swollen, throbbing ankle that was so painful to even move that I think I would pee just lifting it off the bed.

Photo not mine

I didn't sleep well last night. To relieve my pain, my wife and I bought liniment to at least topically ease the pain, but the stuff worked for a short time until it evaporated and the cold negated its heating effect. I was twisting turning on the bed but I had to do that without lifting my swollen ankle. Moving my affected leg was so painful that I had to use my arms to lift it so that I could change position while sleeping. It was so difficult that I (always) promised to watch my diet, but that's a promise that time and time again I fail to keep because every time I feel well again, I forget the pain and just eat food that I like or that caught my fancy especially street food.

Sunrise, I went to the toilet for my regular vowel movement. After I was done, I raised my butt to wash, (well, we Filipinos, majority that is, do not use toilet paper' we wash our butts with our left hands using water and soap) but just raising my butt was so painful that I had to sit down again. Our toilet was not equipped with railings the ones you find in a PWD (People with Disability) toilet that I was grimacing and cursing (por dos por kwatro...por pabor senor...) just lifting a few centimeters off so that I could insert my hand between the toilet seat and my butt. The experience was so painful that I had to slumped back down to the bowl after washing.

Photo definitely not me

Sitting down on the toilet seat was easy; it was the standing up that I was worried about. With no railings to hold on to, I had to put my hands on the rim of the toilet seat, painfully position my affected foot adjacent to my butt to establish the center of gravity, clenched my teeth, and then slowly lift my butt up and painfully rose up with all the courage and the decency not to shout and woke the whole neighborhood up. Add to that the fact that our toilet was manually flushed. Torture...it was torture.

Anyway, my wife was so moved by my condition that she woke up early and ran to the nearest drugstore to buy me planax. God bless her. Anyway, I think I should blame our grade leader because she told me that I needed to submit the grades for my pupils and the stress of just thinking about all that numbers...Naaahhh, its my diet.


Hmmm...maybe I will take a bath because my butt feels sticky.