Constitutional crisis? I doubt it will happen

GREETINGS: Sincere Happy Birthday greetings to our President Noynoy! May the Lord guide and assist him in his personal life and his official duties.

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CRISIS?: We are being told that a constitutional crisis could arise with the filing with the Supreme Court of a petition to quash subpoenas to some banks to bring to the Senate certain documents on alleged accounts of Chief Justice Renato C. Corona — and to suspend the trial altogether.

I raise my small voice to say that I do not believe — this is just a belief — that a constitutional crisis will ensue if the SC will take cognizance of the petitions and the matter is pursued to its logical conclusion.

The Supreme Court’s giving due course to the petition may bring it on a collision course with the Senate impeachment court, but — I believe — this will not necessarily trigger a constitutional crisis.

What may arise could be just personal and/or political crises of certain individuals. Their problems do not necessarily equate to a constitutional crisis.

(It would be a different situation if some partisans later organize street mobs to pursue an ulterior agenda.)

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TWEETING ALONG: The point about a constitutional crisis looming was touched upon in Twitter, an online forum open to the public, where we participate and to which readers are invited.

At the risk of taxing the patience of readers, we reprint below (and sometimes slightly amplify since the original postings had to be confined to 140 characters) some of my tweets on the marathon impeachment hearing:

• Whenever Sen. Franklin Drilon rises to speak at the Corona trial, I can almost hear the prosecution’s heart pounding as the senator-judge’s cavalry charges to the rescue.

• I hate it when TV hosts/announcers butt in with comments while somebody in the impeachment trial is talking. Just let the viewing public listen.

• (So far, I’ve found the TV coverage of ANC very professional, intelligent, probing and fair. It’s all that one has to watch. We give high points to broadcasters Tony Velasquez, Karen Davila, Lynda Jumilla and Adel Tamano.)

• When the bank records of then impeached President Erap Estrada were subpoenaed, huge deposits were reportedly taken out by worried foreigners. Will we see a repeat?

• The alacrity of one or two banks to open their clients’ accounts to the impeachment court is a sad commentary on their political-business maturity.

• The PhilSTAR online poll (asking “You think CJ Corona will be convicted?”) now has 51% saying Yes, down from 66% the other day. Why the slide? (Readers are invited to participate in the survey by visiting the PhilSTAR website.)

• Solon-prosecutor Farinas was candid enough to admit in open court he didn’t read or sign what he said was a poorly crafted impeachment charge sheet. I salute him.

• A tweeter posted: “Kindly tell Niel Tupas someone’s willing to buy his 630-sqm property at Xavierville for P20M!” To which I replied: “Quick, dispose of it!”

• With VP Jojo Binay gaining ground in his quiet campaign for the presidency, I can almost see graft charges being revived and filed against him.

• With the prosecution in disarray in the impeach-Corona trial, the Palace and its LP cohorts better start dusting off their fallback Plan B.

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DWINDLING OIL: I was surprised to receive en email from inventor Harry Freires reacting to my saying that I have this long-held theory that earthquakes are becoming more frequent “because of the accelerated speed and volume of our extraction of the oil that lubricates the earth’s constantly moving subterranean plates.”

I said this in a light vein, but Freires said our thoughts coincided somewhat, after which he referred me to “Freires Theory: Real Cause of Tsunami and Climate-change” in the website <gaciclub.com> and in the new OEMAP website <oemap-phils.org>.

His email (edited for clarity) said: “I know the technique of oil extraction being done now as I was a contractor of ARAMCO before in the late 90’s (ARAMCO is the biggest oil company in the world).

“Massive seawater is injected (from the Persian Gulf in Jubail, Saudi Arabia; freshwater in other places) into the globally dwindling oil wells, as the oil levels underground can no longer be reached by ARAMCO’s submersible pumps. Since oil floats above water, they can further extract, but with additional costs, thus the increase in the prices of oil.

“So far 32 billion tons had been added to the earth due to this technique of fossil fuel extraction. There is a 20-percentage difference in their densities (given a total volume of 800 billion barrels so far extracted by humanity), affecting the centrifugal forces involved in the earth’s rotation on its axis which is now off-center. It’s physics in motion causing a planetary pole shift.

“There are daily extractions at a rate of 84 million barrels per day. Hence the daily earthquakes and landslides. After the magnitude-8.9 earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011, NASA measured a 16-centimeter (6.5-inch) shift in the earth’s axis in one day. Before, the rate was only one centimeter per year. The remaining quantity of fossil fuel still below ground is about 1,000 billion barrels.

“The disaster question now is what volume of fossil fuel extracted will serve as ‘the straw that will break the camel’s back,’ to shift the north and south poles in relation to the equator? This will trigger the massive melting of the two ice caps hundreds of kilometers thick each, and the rising of the sea level.

“One solution is to develop water as fuel (the hydrogen from light water, protium, not deuterium). It can be done. A Filipino inventor has already conceptualized this.”

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