In the Philippines, jailed individuals get to become senators…or would become congressmen for that matter. But in America, a senator was actually arrested, handcuffed and according to Idaho Senator Larry Craig, he “was dragged down” by authorities for suspicion of undertaking lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport restroom.

I’ve already seen boxing and barking legislators of the Taiwanese kind on TV, or a nude woman lawmaker somewhere in Italy—but in America, they have a senator that had been arrested and handcuffed for a misdemeanor just like any other citizen who had committed or under suspicion of having committed a malefaction.

In the Philippines, the whole Senate would be up in arms in defense of their comrade, invoking immunity from arrest, whether right or wrong. Nothing happens like that in America. In the Philippines, lawmakers are even trying to free a detained elect-senator. But in America, nothing sort of that happens for they even get arrested in the first place. In the Philippines, only opposition leaning congressman or congresswoman get arrested in the most upsetting manner. In America, nothing like that happens. They get arrested notwithstanding their political leaning. Nobody says “You are under arrest! By the way? Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” Enough of that “walang ganyan sa America” thing going on in the above-written paragraph.

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I do not usually open forwarded mails especially from those I am far from familiar with, just popping virtually out of nowhere. But ever since the ADZU Highschool Batch 89 Yahoogroup was formed sometime last year, forwarded emails become more and more familiar and I’ve got to open them up or be a killjoy in the net. (Don’t you feel sometimes obligated to open semi-spams just because they’re from someone you know?) At times I felt that way but you know generally I feel gratified just to be mailed at, often straight from America, especially when the emails get funnier and funnier by the day.

Here’s one funny forwarded email from Egay Bayabos—a highschool batchmate who’s now in Florida…errr….Virginia….No, Texas I think….Oh what the heck, it’s not important where he is right now coz I get confused often. There’s just so many of ‘em Batch 89 members who are in America right now….migrated or migrating.

Here’s how the email goes:

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What is a mind? It is not yours; therefore it is “mine”. No, not the right term usage here. Sorry.

Is mind synonymous with brain? Sometimes, having a brain does not necessarily mean one has a mind, like for example when one could not even count from one to ten or spell the word “photosynthesis” (many thanks to the gritty Microsoft spell check for helping me with this one).

Where is your mind? How come your thirty-five years old with four kids and your just sitting there infront of the computer all day long doing God knows what you’re doing with that square contraption in your face? Now that’s my wife with her usual vitriolic tongue aiming and shooting at me and observe carefully how sometimes she thinks I am completely of no mind.

We all know what mind is. It is something within the brain that is impalpable and ethereal, having no physical form. It is the one thing that controls another formless fact of our being, consciousness. See also how consciousness is as formless as mind and examine circumspectly how we all feel it and know it but just could not see it or touch it. Yet we know it is there, our consciousness, like a timeless shadow.

Any old guy with a whiff of something between his ears would surely realize this, that we are a being mostly dependent on consciousness for every movement or act that we make, even those we do without intending like breathing or blinking our eyes, for they just become automatic and routinely. It is like Sting—watching us with ‘every breath we make’ or ‘every vow we break’.

We have all gotten so extremely familiar with consciousness—so familiar in fact that we hardly give a thought about it most of the time. If it is true what many says about familiarity breeding contempt, then we’d be trashing and elbowing and smacking-down our consciousness like hell by now. This despite that it is probably the most startling reality of our own being, and perhaps the most important of all.

Even scientists are far from certain where consciousness comes from or how it actually permeates from the material brain. They have already uncovered the minutest element of the brain and had discovered how the cells inside it emits varied and myriad of electrical pulses that allow the whole human body—and being—to function as it is. But how this happens exactly is what they are at a lost. Perhaps like a computer’s central processing unit, the electrical pulses send commands and programmed codes in order to move the hand, to instill feelings, to smile or frown, to cook, or blog, to ride a jeepney or eat a budget meal, to love and hate—such and such things.

Now scientists have actually delved into an in-depth examination of the consciousness, as neuro-scientists in Chicago have deduced how out-of-body experiences are not so outlandish afterall, contrary to popular belief. By using virtual computer technology, they have observed how subjects put under a virtual mindset have actually felt their virtual selves being threatened as they were beaing approached at (virtually). I am not so particular at how the experiment really went but generally, it was reached as a conclusion that even in mind—without physical structures of the body involved—human beings would react positively to non-physical intrusions or introductions and thereon bolsters the probability that out-of-body experiences might just be a probable human experience. Read this very concise discussion on consciousness and the attempt to uncover it.

Easily, this could be set aside as merely the result of extreme imagination for the mind could imagine possibly everything and when it perceives a threat even just in mind, the body reacts accordingly—physically and mentally.

Yet despite of this major loophole, the study abovementioned is a major headway into the investigation of the human consciousness and then, ultimately of the soul.

Previously, information on out-of-body experiences have been collated solely through accounts by those who have experienced traumatic experiences, mostly by those who had cardiac arrests, as they gain full consciousness after being declared clinically dead. We must note very well how in every such experience, it is extremely startling how every account of an out-of-body experience consists of one very unifying theme, that of seeing tunnels and a bright light at the end of it. As an empirical basis, these testimonies from those “who have came back from the dead” are generally weak and undependable, but as a circumstantial evidence, it is pretty strong and establishing; for how could one effectively explain the astonishing similarities in those accounts despite that they have came from different people living in different geographical locations, having had no contact with each other, and those traumatic incidents being separated by years in occurrence.

When I was so young, way before my highschool years, I was once told a story or rumor by older cousins about how a woman in Subanipa (my grandfather’s hometown in Olutanga Island just south of Pagadian City) died and was about to be buried (probably in the islands before, when one dies, embalmment would be so inconvenient that sometimes those who died are buried on the soonest time possible) yet the woman suddenly rose up from where her cold body was laid and just walked away from the vicinity. Everyone present at her wake was startled to no end of course. As the rumor goes farther, she went on to tell everyone that had inquired about the circumstances of her amazing ressurection how she had seen a long dark tunnel and a bright light at the end of it, so bright in fact that the light was so bright and she had to adjust her sight because of this, but the light she said, had been very comforting, and very pleasing to the senses that she had felt a joy she had never felt in the living world.

Now—whether this story was merely fabricated or not—this account of an out-of-the-body experience approximates what were collated all over the United States throughout the years and it had happened when our world does not yet communicate as effectively as now, no Internet or cable news yet, and that was way before I have started to read similar accounts on Reader’s Digest. Those who had been an ardent Reader’s Digest reader over the years would surely know what I am saying.

For certain, it is not possible that those who have out-of-body experience in America have heard about this rumored woman in Subanipa and replicated her story about death and dying.

Such is how startling these out-of-body experience accounts—we have heard many of them every so often from time to time, through those who have gone thru very traumatic physical incidents and had read or heard how they all had testified to the same circumstances, of tunnels and light, and yet whether we like it or not, we could not just as easily believe this as an incontrovertible truth.

Like how we can always believe that there is a sun circling above or below us, but we just do not know exactly how it came to being or what actually consists it.

I have a dream. This is not really huge or fantastic. Like dreaming of having a grand bungalow or a Lamborghini. On the contrary, it is highly doable.

I dream that one day I’d be able to build a world famous Wordpress theme. How do I achieve it? By practice of course and creating this very simple but elegant Blogsome theme.

This is the CITIZEN ON MARS Blue 1 theme—for Blogsome users, it is readily available for use. I am still trying to figure out how to convert it into a Wordpress theme if it becomes good enough.

In designing this template, I have imagined what design elements were I always looking for when thinking for my own blog site. I had always liked very white pages and very catchy headers and main titles. And I like columns in it, like famous information sites around the web.

This theme that I have designed could easily be customizable for it does not contain many images, merely buttons for bullets and color shadings that can be modified anytime.

For Blogsome users, please download the zip file HERE.

Check out the live demo site.

In my years as a law student, way way back into the nineties, I once imagined in my head a situation wherein a witness to a case failed to show up before the court that summoned him and got himself arrested as a result of this. The judge bellowed at him in a thundering voice about why he failed to respond to his order in the most convenient way, and thereby delaying the case that was at hand.

The man who failed to respond to the subpoena answered, “Your honor, I lived about 400 miles from the city. I couldn’t even afford to commute to the barrio market, how much more could I afford to come to the city?” And so the judge scratched his head and thought that the man got a point.

So perhaps nowadays, the law already provides that any person ordered to become a witness and who resides at least 100 kilometers away from the case venue shall not be punished with contempt or be arrested for failing to appear at the scheduled time and place for him or her to testify.

Section 10 of Rule 21 of the Revised Rules of Court states:

Exceptions. - The provisions of Sections 8 (Compelling attendance) and 9 (Contempt) shall not apply to a witness who resides more than one hundred (100) kilometers from his place of residence to the place where he is to testify by the ordinary course of travel…

So if by any chance you are called to become a witness to a particular case, remember that one could not be held in contempt or be arrested for failing to appear in court when one lives at least 100 kilometers from the case venue. In fact, the court directs that any witness who lives in a relatively distant area from the court would be given kilometrage fees or allowance for travel. The last time I read it was pegged at 100 pesos. But what does 100 pesos afford now? Could one travel from Quiapo to Makati and then back to Quiapo at a 100 pesos travel allowance? It would be so tight as an amount.

Now if the kilometrage fees have already been given, the witness would not anymore be in a position to excuse himself or herself from attending court hearings in order to testify and may already be held for contempt upon such failure.

The above discussion on the compulsion and punishment for non-response to a court order to become witness to a case is in consonance with the general provision on subpoenas where Section 1 of Rule 21 of the Revised Rules of Court provides:

Subpoena and subpoena duces tecum. - Subpoena is a process directed to a person requiring him to attend and to testify at the hearing or the trial of an action, or at any investigation conducted by competent authority, or for the taking of his deposition. It may also require him to bring with him any books, documents, or other things under his control, in which case it is called a subpoena duces tecum.

I’ve been watching closely the Utah mining disaster for nearly two weeks now and on the 11th day, I felt so saddened that instead of finally reaching the six miners trapped underneath the mines since Monday of last week—when the pit there collapsed enormously—three more deaths have occurred.

CNN had been showing even the very tunneling activities made by rescuers—most of whom were colleagues of the trapped miners—and exhibited almost a blow-by-blow account of the rescue operation; it this was thought to be a first in broadcasting history.

I saw how mothers were crying for fear that the trapped miners were already dead, about six to seven days after being trapped there. I also saw those who feared for the lives of those who tried to save lives by digging new tunnels that would have lead to the estimated area where the trapped miners would possibly be.

And this latest tragic incident happened—resulting to more lives lost instead of having saved any . It’s like what most call a lost-lost situation. Authorities in Salt Lake City have finally decided to scale down the rescue operation or call it off ultimately for fear of losing more lives.

This decision reached despite that some days ago, some sounds were heard from below the ground by a microphone and had given hope that the six miners might still be alive in a particular chamber underneath the mine, one that was hoped to have breathable space for the trapped miners to survive.

But eleven days hence, hopes have started to die down. Such tragic, tragic disaster really–despite that every disaster is supposed to be tragic in the first place. I am so saddened now realizing how fathers have lost their lives trying to earn their keep and gain a decent living, leaving wives and children behind, as well as brothers, sisters and comrades. How I wish this sort of thing doesn’t happen or have not happened.

I wonder now how mining is such a dangerous undertaking. We’ve heard ever so often how mining disasters occur in every part of the world, from South America to Asia, to places in Peru and in China, over and over again, throughout the years. America is the most developed nation in the world and still, no fool-proof mining scheme have been established despite that as a country, America have been mining minerals such as coal so vigorously for centuries now. The mining operation in Salt Lake City, where the disaster had occurred, was mining for coal to be used for energy and heating in households. There are such 18,000 coal mines spread all over America and as a long as the need for coal remains high, such disaster would always be at risk of happening.

I wonder if the danger posed by coal mining—which includes sending miners dangerously so deep underneath the ground—would justify other sourcing of energy like nuclear plants, which some sectors believe could be largely safer when it comes to deaths by accidents, as opposed to mining operations.

But radioactivity or the danger of contamination by such seems to be a looming hazard, like a huge fearful shadow that we often imagine at night when we were still so young as kids trying to get sleep so late at night.

Such is the dilemma posed by this mining disaster, between safety and the need for more and more sources of energy.