Flowing with the Cycle

Root of All Evil: the love of money

2011-11-09T19:10:00.000-08:00

More often quoted than fully understood, the Pauline's quotation in 1Timothy 6:10:

"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs."

is a timely reminder to all of us post the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and its impending "W" recurring crisis in 2011 a.k.a. the Euro Woes, that Money is a human concept and devoid of reality in the light of eternity.

I often wondered how would the world be like had money, credit, finance, stock markets, exchange rates and all the other virtual world of Mammon had not been conceptualized and invented. In other words, had humans remain as Stone Age Hunters and Gatherers?

Imagine there is no Money,
No Wealth to Fight for,
No Mortgages to pay,
Everybody take and give,
According to their needs;
Never their greed.

The World would be Greener and Happier,
Every creature living in Harmony,
Less Convenient maybe,
But Paradise on Earth,
Nonetheless!

In a world before the invention of money, credit, refrigeration, logistics and global trade, Man took from Nature what they need. It is akin to the harvest of "Manna", provided free by God but harvested only to the amount that is needed or the excess will be rendered useless by the following day.

Natural resources, provided free by Nature in a sustainable and renewable way by Nature: Sunshine, Fresh Air, Plants, Animals, Fishes are never over exploited because there is no Market to trade the excess harvest.

With no instrument to store and exchange wealth value a.k.a. "Money", Greed cannot be institutionalized.

In an egalitarian society forced upon by the ubiquity of resources, the absence of Money and the futility of material stock holding, Hunters and Gatherers had no concept of private ownership of what is provided free by Nature.

Man hunt and gather from Nature according to needs and never greed simply because it does not pay to be greedy.

The invention of Money to facilitate exchange and its unintended consequences in its store value of portable wealth that can easily be transformed into material, together with the concept of private ownership changed everything to the our current global state of in-sustainability.

We have over exploited Nature's original design of self sustainability and renew-ability by consuming tomorrow's resources in today's time with the clever financial devise call "Credit".

In days of old, we save to invest; today we spend away our future and enslave ourselves to lifetime servitude to Mammon, paying off our mortgages and credit card debts.

Feeding the Machine with our blood, sweat and tears, it is time we stop, look up and insist that enough is enough, this insanity must cease and the altar to Mammon must be torn down!

Indeed, man can only serve one exclusive master at a time: God OR Mammon just as the Jesus Christ of Nazareth once said in Matthew 6:24:

"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."

Economics: The Dismal Science

2010-05-06T17:54:00.000-07:00

Having been acquainted with the subject of Economics since I first studied it while in school in the late 1970s, from Micro to Macro Economics, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, from Laissez Faire to Communism, from the collapse of the Communist Utopia in the 1990s and the recurring booms and busts of Capitalist Economics: it has dawned upon me and many others I believe that in our common pursuit of the illusive goal of human material happiness, we have all been duped.

Duped by none others than ourselves.

It has been said that what differentiates humans from other living things on Planet Earth is: Financial Worries.

It is not that non humans do not have physical needs like food and shelter, but that while humans have so called "progressed" from mere hunters and gatherers like animals to farming and industrialization, the agricultural, industrial and information technology revolution has brought us, ironically closer to Doomsday.

As we build, we destroy and as we in concert seek economic growth, we stimulate the economy by stroking the flames of consumption and production that exceeds the natural constraint of natural sustainable replenishment cycles.

In our misguided passion for economic growth, we will spare no effort in coming up with various devices to balloon up the figures.

The dismal consequence is at the end of the day, we are straddled with a ballooned economy awaiting explosion that will implode upon us.

When Lord Keynes first creatively devised the idea of inflating a sluggish economy out of recession by way of government spending, it was largely and initially rejected by Laissez Faire Economy Purists as interventionist against the spirit and letter of Capitalism.

When Keynesian Economics seem to do the trick in smoothing out the kinks in Capitalism; Reformed Capitalism with an element of selective government intervention and regulation has become the global economic religion.

Along the way, came economists of the caliber of Lord Keynes and singing from the same hymn sheet albeit cloaked in different attire like Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson opposing one another, seemingly on opposing poles but with the common thread of government involvement and regulation.

The persistent suppression of a low interest rate economy to stimulate consumption and investment during the long tenure of Alan Greenspan (American economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006) is one classic anathema to Laissez Faire Economics Doctrine where the Adam Smithsonian's Market Invisible Hands are the only hands that should self regulate and sustain the long term harmony of the Free and Fair Market.

Over the past 200 years or so of New World history, the USA has unravelled to us how ugly the laws of the unregulated jungle of Capitalism can be. From anti-trust legislation to prevent price fixing and monopoly to the ban on short selling and other stock market manipulations through insider trading, we are now faced with the hitherto unregulated financial market instruments like 'derivatives".

While it had been the sole exclusive right of the government as the printer of all her currency notes and banks, the creators of credit within the statutory deposit regulatory mechanisms set by the government regulatory bodies, the new financial device of "derivatives" seemed to have escaped the radar of the financial regulators that had almost caused the total collapse of the global financial and banking system in October, 2008.

The bail out by the US Government on selected financial and banking institutions, deem too big to fail may have saved the Capitalist World from a catastrophic collapse, albeit for the moment, major systemic and structural weaknesses have yet been materially addressed.

The current (2010) national financial challenges faced by the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece & Spain) are just the precursor of things to come as more countries with similar structural problem of persistent chronic fiscal deficits faced difficulties in rolling over their debts due to humongous accumulated budget overruns, inadequate revenue collection and weak political willpower.

The prognosis is dismal.

It will look like a total collapse of the global financial system is inevitable so as to usher in a New World Order.

It looks like Frederich Hegel's Thesis of "Thesis, Anti-Thesis, Synthesis" will reign true and supreme, once again, this time over Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

But all is not lost, yet.

In a post Synthesized New Global Economic Order, I envisaged for those who choose to be outside the system will return to basics: "hunting and gathering", albeit in substance rather than just mere form.

If we have yet learned the very basic survival skills of finding and making your own water, food, fuel, shelter, clothing and medicine, now is the time, even today is the right time to commence.

In Scouting, the motto is: "Be Prepared"; in Royal Rangers: "Be Ready".

Either way, if you are neither prepared nor ready, you are doomed in defaulted failure.

Durians

2010-01-29T07:59:00.000-08:00

People are like Durians, you either love them or lothe them, Coz, they can be hell outside, but heaven inside, Or, hell outside and worst still, crap inside! Alex Kee, 29Jan2010, Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Smelly Quote

2010-01-29T07:48:00.000-08:00

"When you hate someone, even his shadow stinks; if you love, even his fart smells good."

Alex Kee, 29Jan2010

Green Money

2009-12-25T18:39:00.000-08:00

Reflecting on the November 2008 Global Financial Crisis made me research the origins of the US monetary and financial system and the uncovered facts, were to state the least: utmost illuminating!

The US Dollar, a.k.a. "Greenback" were IOUs (I Owe yoU) empowered by the Constitution to the Government of the day by the people, to issue payments for goods and services rendered.

There is not a need to borrow money with or without usury and then pay for goods and services rendered to the people through the Government, because the Government is precisely the people and it does not make sense to pay usury to private bankers when the Government is empowered by Law (the Constitution) to print legal tender money.

When Abraham Lincoln is President, he paid for goods and services rendered to the Government by printed Greenbacks and the Greenbacks were then used by the people who received them to buy other goods and services for other people and through this, money is circulated into the economy and the economy expanded.

These were "fiat" money, that is money issued in faith, without the backing of any gold, precious metal or even borrowings.

While the primary fear of fiat money is its continuous store of value and public acceptability, its integrity is not so much its intrinsic but confidence value.

In times past, tokens ranging from stones to corrie shells and even common table salt (that is where the term 'salary' originated) were used as money.

Usury burdens the borrower and it makes no sense that the Government, who is the collective "people" should indebt the people through borrowed money to finance projects that are needed by the people, when the Government is empowered by Law to manufacture as much money as they need to govern the people.

Borrowing from private bankers to finance Government projects for the benefit of the people will only enrich the private bankers at the expense of the people, burdening them with higher taxes to pay off the usury charged by the private banking entrepreneurs.

Printing money to pay for goods and services rendered to the people under the Government auspices, per se, will not drive up inflation, provided there are idling resources waiting for capital to stimulate their sustainable exploitation.

What drives inflation is when too much money is chasing after too few goods and services.

If the economy is undergoing recession because there is not enough money around, either because people do not have the money and/or or too cautious to spend, it is time for the Government to prime the pump by printing money and spending on projects that will benefit the people.

Only Governments have the right to print money and this power can be used for good or evil.

If deployed for good, the printing of money, unbacked by gold or even borrowings is not only benign; but necessary and beneficial.

The last thing the people want is an economy with not enough money when money could merely be printed by the Government with the backing of gold or the Government indebt the people with borrowings from private bankers to spend for the benefit of the people.

I say, plagiarizing Oliver Cromwell, "Melt down all the misconceptions and circulate all the needed printed dollars into the Economy"!

Contemplations On the Mandatory Death Sentence

2009-12-18T21:16:00.000-08:00

"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind", Mahatma Gandhi famously said.

Perhaps, it is because we are spiritually blind that we endorse the reciprocity of sin disguised as deterrent punishment.

Is it logical to chop off the hand of a convicted thief who stole because he needs food to survive and condemn him to seek no other avenues of making a living but to risk his other remaining hand in order to put food into his mouth?

As Mencius puts it, all human beings endeavor to do good, but distractions are a plenty and the onus is on the strong to bear the weak.

Alas, there are few keepers around today, especially brother's keepers.

Let us work towards a more compassionate cultured society.

Progress in civilization had actually digress humanity towards monstrosity.

Let there be Love, Peace and Hope among us, especially at these trying times when almost every known systems seem to be broken!

May 2010 be a better year.

The Moral Capitalist: Oxymoron?

2009-11-15T20:48:00.000-08:00

This is a conversation between a "classically trained capitalist marketer" and a "reformed capitalist turned environmentalist":

========

Venture Platform Pte Ltd "Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality" Peter Drucker

Thu at 11:15am · Comment · Like / Unlike

Alex Kee

With due respect to the late Peter Drucker, this is a typical capitalist speaking. Quality today in the light of anthropogenic climate change, now ought to encompass responsible manufacturing and end of life disposal issues.

Thu at 3:57pm · Delete · Report

Venture Platform Pte Ltd

Which is still what the customers will pay for.

Why do you think companies which encompass responsible manufacturing and end of life disposal issues, are able to sell their services at a higher price?

Corporate and social responsibilities are capitalistic concerns as well.

2 hours ago · Report

Alex Kee

Corporate & social responsibilities are capitalistic concerns only if they help rack in more for the bottom-line of the Capitalist, but if they can get away with blue murder, they will. It is for the People, through legislation that shall ensure that capitalist entrepreneurs oblige compliance. Be honest about it, we all talk big about taking care of the environment with our lips but nothing through our pocket or actions, because we only want to pay for what we use, not how the end of life is disposed or how the product was made in the first place, like Peter Drucker has said from the myopic Capitalist-Marketing focal point.

2 hours ago · Delete · Report

Venture Platform Pte Ltd

They do. If they do not, the market does not need it anyway.

So do not blame capitalists for doing whatever you deem is harmful to environment.

Are consumers going to pay for it, the market is the final arbiter of it. Capitalists can only follow what the market needs. Contrary to what you may think, they do not dictate what the market needs.

2 hours ago · Report

Alex Kee

Correct, let's blame ourselves for learning wrong lessons from our teachers who were taught wrong knowledge by their teachers. The market wants cheap credit so that they can spend now and pain later. Everyone is looking for passive income and growth on their investment. Everyone wants to grab; but nobody wants to give and when institutions are too big to fail, we bail them out: We, the people under the guise of "the Government". There is no free lunch and we are all in it as one common community on Planet Earth and that is the hard facts beyond clever marketing and ideologies. The environment is not for turning; we shall reap what we sow!

about an hour ago · Delete · Report

Repent, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

2009-11-13T04:52:00.001-08:00

Mega scale solar thermal projects to generate “green electricity” is never going to be feasible because the constraints, limits and ethos are all stacked against it.

The maximum potential amount of solar energy falling on a square meter of land in the wilderness of Australia is 7 or even 8kWh per day.

Assuming a unrealistic 100% energy conversion efficiency rate and stack them against the amortized capital cost (assuming running input cost is zero, what will the cost-performance (returns) be?

Solar energy is not unlimited; it is constrained limits and this is one of the fundamental first principles that we should be aware of, always.

The ethos of converting solar energy into electricity so that we can continue to live our wanton energy guzzling lives and not making inconvenient adjustments to cut down our energy footprint will only get us back to square one.

Indeed, the Earth can supply all of our needs; never our greed.

If we, however, live within the Cycle of Sustainability and Renew-ability, even fossil fuel is a sustainable resource.

Alas, we are all caught up in the hurry to “progress” and “grow” our economies to the detriment of our larger meaning of quality living.

Fellow earthlings, Repent, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle before we reach the tipping point of no return!

A Response to Pure Capitalism

2009-11-11T06:39:00.000-08:00

This is my response to:
http://www.myfreedompost.com/2009/11/video-of-jon-voights-speech-in.html

...an extract is stated below:

=============================

THE FREEDOM POST: VIDEO OF JON VOIGHT'S SPEECH IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Source: www.myfreedompost.com

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.4...
==============================

True. Both extremes of Socialism and Capitalism, in fact any "ism" are bound to fail because they are idealistic whereas human economic problems need pragmatic and real solutions. Unless we have more benevolent capitalist like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Colgate, Carnegie and the like, the only face of Capitalism that the People will see will just ... Read Morebe the Ugly. Throughout history, a hungry person is still a dangerous people who will risk the uncertainty of change in the hope of a better tomorrow. When Hope is all that is left, let's hope the change is the right.

What are the Possible Causes of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis?

2009-11-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

The root cause of the Financial Crisis of 2008 is the unfettered creation of credit and money fueled by human greed for “economic and business growth” at any price and at any cost.

Before the creation of credit, one has to save enough money to buy or consume a commodity or a service or to barter if no money is to be transacted.

To boost sales, credit was invented and suddenly, when people are able to consume something with future money, GDP and the wealth of nations increase by leaps and bounces.

When new and more creative money and credit devices are created e.g. the stock market, derivatives, futures etc, further balloon wealth is created and without the real physical assets to support the created mirage of wealth, it is a matter of time the balloon burst.

Money can be created by printing, but real wealth is built upon sweat, blood and tears of enterprise, diligence and ingenuity.

If more money can solve all of the world’s problems, the printing of more paper money will solve all the world’s problems, but we know that is not the case.

The way out of this global financial crisis is for us all to return to the fundamental issue of what is the purpose of the human life and to add value while we are here on Earth.

While we need money to live; living just for money make life a baloney.

For us who lost much money through this crisis, be thankful, we could have lost our lives and sanity as well, so let us return to sanity.

For us who has not lost anything because we had nothing to start with, let us be also thankful that the Lord Who feeds the sparrows and clothe the lilies is the same and identical Almighty that sustains us and to who all humanity destined to when our term finally expires on Earth.

Let us through this crisis, return to sanity and appreciate the real meaning of living and begins to appreciate the serenity of Joy, Peace and Love, not necessarily with money and wealth.

Goodbye 2008, Happy 2009!

At this crisis time, no amount of blame apportioning finger-pointing will be helpful, neither any panic knee jerk reactive actions or inaction.

USA and generally the rest of the linked globalized world is facing what Dr. Peter Senge in his book “The Fifth Discipline” described as “paradigm paralysis” warranting a “shift in paradigm” and a change in “mindset”.

In the past 100years, history records for us the failure of the planned economy a.k.a. soviet styled central command planned economy, culminating in the implosion of the Soviet Union.

Now it seems the alternative to Soviet economic system at the opposite of the economic model continuum, the laissez-faire or free economy seems to be failing to the brink of a similar implosion.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis propound Hegel and Fichte is the dialectic thinking outside our boxed paradigm and dogmatic mindset way out of the similar global economic-financial hammering at the very remaining foundations of the capitalist system since the other alternative had failed more than 2 decades ago.

Age old and universal dialectic is the way to go, but can 21st Century homo sapiens put aside personal and even national interest for the sake of the larger and paramount global interest?

Alas, I am pessimistic.

The human race is far too parochial and divided to see beyond his own navel to see ourselves as citizens of island Earth in the whole wide Universe.

There is no other place we can call home, save Planet Earth and it is only when we see ourselves facing the same identical fate that we shall either swim or sink together as one humanity.

There is still hope, if we remain united as one, united by common purpose and meaning because we are humans sharing a common Earth, then only can we see the meaning and purpose of enriching our neighbors because it will ensure our own survival too.

Like it or hate it, the person who taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves some 2000years ago still rings true today, but will the words of Jesus Christ, a Jew from the tribe of Judah still have a place in our heart let alone in our ears alone?

May the Good Lord forgive our sins as we repent and do what is right before Him, comprehensive and holistically from as diverse a matter as the environment to personal finance.

Ted, if you grasp the spirit and not just the letter of Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline, we will less likely to be gridlocked into chronic paradigm paralysis by endless finger pointing rhetoric but join in the light of the New Hope led by the President of Change: Barack Hussein Obama.

The name Barack Hussein Obama is in itself, an antithesis to the legacy thesis of USA and unless we confront the failing thesis with another alternative antithesis to arrive at synthesis, we remained captives of our own paradigm, that’s my point.

Partisan politics has its role in its safeguard against tyranny through a comprehensive system of checks and balances including the separation of powers, alternative competing philosophies and a free press, but not when America and the rest of the world who follows American leadership in ideals, values and economic system are in trouble and seeking ways towards a new paradigm and even adopting a new mindset.

Change, we must and Change we ought to, for where there is No Change, there is No Chance!

I am beginning to like you and that is not a joke, seriously. I like your candidness and if you are as serious as I am, even naive, it is fine with me, we are all entitled to our own views and as long as we don’t seek and use violence to promote or instill our beliefs, it is entirely fine with me.

I just have one question.

If you know the problem(s) what is/are your solutions?

If you are the President of the USA, what would you do save blaming people, parties and systems?

And to Faisal, your Islamic system as the new paradigm is interesting, can you share a little details how the Islamic system is the better vis-a-vis Marxism and Capitalism, save the God system part, because the US Dollar has the famous “In God We Trust” and yet her economy is in shambles! And please don’t tell me they are different gods here, to me it is irrelevant and irreverent.

Tell me why and how “Islamic Economics” is different and better than the two other systems in the dichotomy or continuum.

interesting ideas no doubt, but neither new nor fresh I am afraid.

It seems to me another Utopian Dream Economics ala Marxist or Egalitarian with the element of “God” skew.

I am also personally against Usury but see Capital as one of the two other economic resources: Land and Labor.

For the reward for the use of Labor is the payment of Wages, Land: Rent and Capital: Interest, Dividend, Profits etc.

Money is a form of Capital and the risk of parting of one’s money (cold cash, gold, liquid convertible assets) surely had to be the reward or incentive of interest as returns.

For the past 1400 years or so, we have yet to experience a viable “Islamic Economic System”.

Perhaps out of the ashes of Marxist and Capitalism Collapse, could we see the emergence of the Synthesis, with Islamic as a potential candidate?

Well, I am no prophet so I cannot foretell.

But certainly, with the Islamic Economic System as painted by you, I would rather be the hammer than the nail i.e. the Borrow, rather than the Lender .

No malice meant here but I am always tickled pink by a Notice I saw hanging out from a shop in Los Angeles, California, USA.

It says in Bold:

“In GOD we Trust TRUST, others pay CASH”

To me that is the succinct meaning of the printed slogan on the reverse side of the US Dollar Bill or was that the cheeky hint that In God we Trust and not others because all man are liars, politicians, bankers, lawyers, priests, imans, monks, soldiers, homemakers etc etc.

Well, you make your own conclusion(s).

By the way, I am not a youth anymore, but I am still a student nevertheless, because for as long as I live, I continue to learn new things and often by first unlearning the wrong or outdated, obsolete things first.

But one truth remains:

Let God be true and all Men: Liars! (Romans 3:4, Psalms 11:16)

It does not matter whether one believes in God or not, all humans need air, water, food, shelter etc to survive and in the modern day, money usually buys all these necessities and that is what money is for: a mean to an end.

No billionaire will want to give the 1/40? You mean billionaires who claim themselves Muslims or “infidels” billionaires like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates?

Go check your facts before you speak, please.

Usually the worst people are the religious hypocrites and that transcends religion type.

You may ask, how can we build and maintain billion dollars cathedrals, temples and religious buildings when so many of our neighbors die from the lack of basic potable water, nutrition, clothing and shelter?

When we rather spend our scarce resources on so called “defense” killing one another rather than helping one another because I see my Father’s creation in my brothers and sisters face although they bear a different color and have a different religion from me?

Why did God create such a mess with so much diversity when He could have just created one homogeneous commodity of humanity with identical color skin?

My take is even if we are homogeneous in color, homo sapiens will still fight one another because like it or not, there is an inherent class struggle defect in the human species!

The conclusion is not whether I or you believe in God, but are we prepared to love one another as brothers and sisters because we share a common ancestry, a common Earth and a common Destiny when we are gone from planet Earth, now or in the distant future when all things must come to an end, even the Solar System exploding into oblivion?

If we know how significant we are, we will become more generous with others.

Islam is no different from all other religions I supposed, they all espouse good works but alas their followers hardly follows.

2.5% per year is ambitious. if it is just 1% and from all the combined wealth of Middle East Oil revenues itself, I suppose Muslim countries like Pakistan, Indonesia, Palestine etc will be very well today, but alas the classic failing rings true cross culture and religion: Good Religion; Bad Followers.

Yes, it is still the big “IF” and I guess we all can always dream and hope, but the reality still is, I assert:

“Let God alone be true and all men (and women), Liars (me included).”

The 2008 Global Economic Crisis is rooted in easy unbridled, unregulated and undisciplined credit.

But ironic it may seem, the availability of easy credit is what that grew the global economy in an unprecedented pace in the last 10 years.

The invention of credit was also what that spearheaded the accelerated growth of business, trade, commerce, manufacturing, mining, banking and every aspect of the economy.

In the subsistence economy of old where each family grew their own food and are self sufficient substantially, there is little trade and the economy did not grow much on an aggregate basis.

It was the creation of credit, where one can consume now with future wages, profits and income that made the sale of house, automobiles and other big ticket items take off in a mass market scenario.

China tried to manufacture its way out of poverty by selling its products to USA at the expense of paying a high environment cost for it, an now, she is paying a disproportionate level of cost, financially, economically and even politically and socially.

China in fact lend USA the money she made from the selling of goods and services to USA, so that she can continue to buy Chinese goods.

China, like Japan holds much US bonds and hopefully the Chinese will remain sane and not dump US bonds for US cash, causing the collapse of the US economy internationally.

China and Japan, together with the rest of the world outside USA, especially Europe are now like multiple commonly joined “twins” and we have no choice but to float or sink together as one big globalized nation.

Neither gold nor silver nor any form of currency is “real wealth” as you perceive.

The only real wealth that exists on earth are the lives you impacted upon while you are alive on earth, and that is not even in the pie-in-the-sky “Heaven” or Paradise with flowing rivers of wine and multitudes of virgins to service you.

If we had returned and remained in the gold or silver standard domain of the old, we would have turned the clock back to the Middle Ages.

Whilst I do not condone the wanton creation of false wealth by the printing of money or credit, curtailing economic growth to the pace of how fast gold and silver could be mined and minted into currencies is no solution either.

If USA has to print the Amero, so be it, if it solves the global economic problem; but things are not so simple. However, it is a much more progressive idea that regressing to medieval solutions.

By the way, it is easy to blame others for problems we ourselves also contributed to in whole and it parts, so please, minorities are always easy to a target at, as we, as a so called humanity had ill-treated for a more than 2000 years.

Faisal, FYI, paper money was first invented by the Chinese, that is factual history; “paper zionist currency”, I am not certain.

I do foresee a day where paper money will disappear, not because it is outlawed, but because there are better ways to transact as in mobile money in Africa via mobile phone money transfers.

History also shows us for what the Muslims collectively persecuted the Jews: it is pale compared to what the Christians collectively persecuted the Jews, culminating in Nazi Germany’s mass extermination of the Jews in the Second World War (of course this historical verifiable fact is still being disputed by certain people and certain parties, then and even now).

Gold, silver, platinum, titanium and all minerals need to be mined, refined and minted, and in order for them to have any intrinsic monetary exchange value, they must be sufficiently rare.

To bridle any economy on the account of the pace on how fast gold and silver in the ground or in the sea could be processed and turn into money would be foolhardy in the context of a 21st Century globalized economy.

Gold and silver was the the currency of China, and the currency of international trade with Europe during the 1800’s, but as you are aware, when silver flowed out of England into China and tea leaves flowed vice-versa, the tide was only reversed when British opium, grown in occupied India flowed into China and silver flowed back into England that started the Opium Wars that ended the Ching Dynasty that started the Modern China period.

No, much as gold and silver I like to own, nothing is like melting down the Silver Saints and circulate them into the economy, plagiarizing Oliver Cromwell.

At the end of the day, it is the people that matters and we all wonder how can the rich live off the sufferings of the poor and that applies to all seats of powers: political, religious, organizational etc.

What is the meaning of Saint Peters Cathedral in Rome, Saint Pauls in London, Kaaba in Mecca, Taipei 101, Petronas Twin Towers, Shanghai Tower etc when billions in the world are without even the most basic drinking water, sanitation, nutrition, clothing, warmth and shelter?

The world is not without its riches and there is enough wealth to spread around, rather it is the unequal and inequitable distribution of wealth where it ought to have been distributed willingly by the haves to the have nots that is the root of the problem.

Throughout history, thinkers and philosophers had tried to think and seek out a solution, from the Buddha right up to Karl Marx, various solutions from personal enlightenment to social re-engineering had been propounded, but none seems to work.

Faisal, your Muslim Solution is one of the many propounded solutions, I am afraid.

There are challenging times ahead of us and as we create solutions to an old economic problem, let us remain optimistic and open minded and not be boxed up by our limited parochial interest and perspective and blinkered by our prejudice and mantras.

Peace to you, my friend.

Faisal, I am a keen reader of history and if my memory serves me right, the last Ottoman Sultan was bankrupted and had to be done away with with the lost of the Axis to the Alliance in the Second World War.

I am not certain if the Ottoman system is Islamic for you, if it is, your theory about the flawlessness of the Islamic system you claimed as revealed in the Koran and elsewhere remains, at best, a pipe dream (pun unintended).

If not, there probably will never be a viable “Islamic Financial-Economic System”, empirically.

Name me please, your working model example: Taliban Afghanistan, Wahabi Saudi Arabia, Secular Islamic Indonesia, Islamic-Islamic Pakistan. Islamic-Malay Brunei?

You are probably referring to the system to come in the future, just as Christians look to the Millennium Rule of Christ or the Buddhist for the coming of the Maitreya Buddha of Prosperity.

If so, I rest my argument because Utopia will always be a dream like Heaven or Paradise may seem to be for all us lost souls yearning for a better place and a better in eternity. This is what many deemed as “Hope beyond Hope”?

Mind my cynicism.

We only have one life, we only have one Earth and we only have one chance on Earth, so let us make the best of it and not blow it up or screw it up because we are going to Heaven and Earth can go to Hell for all we care. Is that the right attitude we should take? Ought we? To me, an emphatic NO!

If we cannot realize a little semblance of Heaven on Earth for our kindred, we are not fit to be stewards of God’s Earth by just promising Paradise as the opium to sedate our daily struggle for survival!

Niang, I am heartened that you are matured in your concern for a mere 17 year old; I was still partying in my hippie days when I was your age!

Well, times have changed but the needs of homo sapiens for clean drinking water, nutritious food, clothing, shelter, transport, energy, heating etc remains unchanged throughout human history.

Do not be alarmed about what is going on around you, in Chinese Tao philosophy, the Ying Yang has to come to an equilibrium, so the world economy is finding its own natural equilibrium before it become stable again, and that has to happen by aggregate natural processes: the so called “Wu Wei” or “Sans Actions” or “The Invisible Hands” of the free economy.

Don’t rely on the government to do anything, they are no gods and sometimes, the more they intervene, the worst the situation becomes.

Governments are faceless and whether they are put in place through the ballot or the bullet, they face one common problem, they have no money. They merely tax and spend on behalf of the people. When they don’t have enough they literally beg, borrow or steal and that includes the printing and creating of more new money.

I am assuming you are from an agrarian based nation like China, if so, you will still have your land to provide you and your family your basic survival needs, you will be OK. Woe is you if you have only the desert and oil or buildings and worthless bills: you can’t eat sand, concrete and paper money or drink oil.

Yes, the New World Order is coming and it has to come, engineered or otherwise but blessed is the man or the woman who keep faith in the goodness of God and goodness of man in loving and bettering his or here neighbor!

Which is Worse, "There is Only 1 Choice" or "You have No Choice"?

2009-11-05T19:16:00.000-08:00

Me think the former because when you have to actively "choose" to have the only one choice left rather than just passively let things be on "default mode", it is like adding injury to insult.

In life and even in death, if it is possible, we must retain the dignity to exercise our freedom of choice.

Even God in His Omnipotence did not contradict Himself in His attribute, he left us the choice to choose Him or to reject Him.

Of course the consequences of our choice is for us to bear, just as he bore our iniquities if we choose to cast them unto Him should we choose not to carry them.

Yet still, we still have our own cross to bear, nonetheless.

Economic Cycles or Deception Cycles, Really ?

2009-10-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

I remember reading about the inevitability Economic Cycles of Boom and Bust in a Laissez Faire Capitalistic System, as if these cycles are inherent weaknesses of the System and must be accepted as a necessary evil or imperfections as it is with Democracy as a System.

In my adult life, I have personally experienced at least 3 downturns: the early 1980s just as I was freshly graduated from Business School, the Great Asian Currency Crisis of the late 1990s and now, the Global Economic Crisis of 2008.

The classical theory behind economic cycles is the inherent mismatch of production to match consumption demand to the point of overproduction, not unlike the situation of cash crops demand and supply feedback phenomenon. When the supply of a certain cash crop cannot meet the existing demand due say to bad weather or diseases, many farmers jump into the bandwagon and start planting the same crop at the same time, and inevitably ripens, harvested and put on sale in the market at the same time, a glut in the market drives down prices, less planting, less supply and the next upward price spiral repeats the cycle.

The other modern theory is that if hot money is not put into the real economy, but merely into the financial market like stocks and shares, derivatives, real estate speculation, this drives the financial market bubble causing it to inevitable explode one fine day when the frantic music stops in a game of musical chairs.

Having gone through 3 cycles, I am beginning to doubt if there is going to be a 4th and subsequent cycles as the politicians, economists and all vested interested people have wanted us to believe and put our faith in Economic Cycles.

The seduction to have us believe that Economic Cycles are natural and inevitable reinforces our acceptance of assurance that whatever goes up must come down and in defiance of gravity, whatever that goes down, will rise up too.

My take of the situation is the creation of money and credit to stimulate aggregate consumption and drive economic growth is not sustainable for the simple reason that unless the real resources is there to support the man made monetarily and financially created wealth, any additional virtual wealth is only going to drive up prices as too much money chases after too few goods and services.

Another real threat to the survivability of homo sapiens lies in the ability to feed, clothe and heat ourselves given the past half decade of potential global famine in the later part of the 2oth Century was only avoid thanks to cheap fossil fuel.

The so called "Green Revolution" in food production was only sustainable not due exclusively to superior high yielding crops but also the application of petroleum based plants fertilizers.

As oil peaks, pollution sickens and climate change threatens the status quo, a new point of balance or homeostasis in world population versus sustainable resources would present itself.

Like mice in an overcrowded cage, Malthusian attrition is the inevitable prognosis, I am afraid.

Globally, we have reached the tipping point in population explosion.

The picture are happy healthy goldfishes swimming about in an overpopulated fishbowl and when the blackout cuts off the electricity that powers the aeration pump, we see fishes bellying up.

We are kept alive in all intend and purpose by past cheap oil and the time has come when no amount of money buy any commodities any more, because we have eaten our last fish and drank our last glass of fresh water.

A New World Order Starts With A New World Currency?

2009-10-05T02:18:00.000-07:00

Preamble

With the global economic crisis triggered off by the US financial and banking crisis in September, 2008, the world is still teetering in fear of a potential failure in the US Dollar, a store of value for many a nation's reserve of wealth.

There is now an urgent call in unison by a diverse mix of nations ranging from China, Russia and even Brazil for an alternative global trading currency to replace the US Dollar.

A journalist from the STAR Newspaper had even wrote a long article about the wisdom of replacing the US Dollar in this Sunday's (04October, 2009) newspaper.

He has argued for an Asian centric currency to replace the US Dollar to facilitate trading transactions between Asian countries, probably one that is underwriting by the world's second and third biggest economies: China and Japan.

The basic justification is cost (the avoidance of forex related works) and risk management (avoid potential erosion of stored wealth kept in US Dollars).

Rise of the Asian Mammon?

Whilst the idea of an Asian based regional currency seems very seductive to Asians, I would caution it on the side of wisdom.

In understanding the roles and functions of exchange rates in their "invisible hands" self regulating and self adjusting mechanism of international trade, settlement of accounts and store of reserves, there are merits and justifications for the retention of individual nation's local currency amidst a commonly international currency rather than the abandonment of all local currencies in adopting just one common global currency.

Whilst the primary merit of adopting one global currency to replace all individual nations' currencies lies in the avoidance of exchange losses, the lost of national sovereignty and local government fine tuning flexibility through local micro management often offsets whatever gains that may be obtained by abandoning the status quo of having a local currency in the midst of another international trading currency or currencies.

The free floating exchange rate mechanism in the context of a free international market setting is supposed to self adjust itself to equilibrium.

For example, in the event where a country buys more than it sells with another country, the demand for the surplus country's currency will rise and cause the import price of goods to go up and therefore , hopefully the demand to go down and self adjust without the need for any government intervention.

Moreover,the reason why the US Dollar became the global de-factor trading currency is not something that had been forced upon us by USA, but something that the world outside USA had come to adopt as a matter of expediency.

In avoiding the lost in currency exchanges, we thus as countries like oil exporting Saudi Arabia, selling oil internationally denominated not in Saudi Riyal, but in US Dollars and importing goods and services also denominated in US Dollars.

The factory of the world, China likewise buys raw materials internationally denominated in US Dollars and sells her manufactured goods international, denominated not in Renminbi (RMB) but but in US Dollars as well, because China need to import raw materials like oil, iron ore etc and there are obvious advantages to buy and sell in one common currency to avoid exchange losses as currencies are converted from RMB to USD, USD back to RMB or any other local currencies where raw materials are bought from or manufactured goods sold to.

If based on pure economic dynamics, given that USA had over the decades, been importing more than she exports, the demand for USD should have dropped in value as demand for USD lag behind the supply of USD.

The only reason why the value USD remained high is a distortion in demand where the demand for USD is not purely for the purpose of settling accounts, but other reasons including the store of reserves, speculations and others.

For example, Saudi Arabia could have insisted that her oil be paid in Saudi Riyal, but the reason USD is adopted as the currency of quotation and settlement is because Saudi Arabia has to import virtually everything aside from oil.

The US Dollar is therefore internationalized out of expediency and prior to the advent of the European Union Euro in 2000 AD, the US Dollar is peerless and is the sole international currency available for international trade, settlement of payments and store of value.

However, with the advent of the Euro juxtaposition to the USD, not only does the USD now has a competitor; it now has a benchmark of value as people can now alternate between the two alternative international currencies.

I can still remember the cautious skeptical reception to the Euro's debut into the international scene in 2000, when it was valued slightly below the USD.

Today, in October 2009, 1Euro is exchanged for USD1.472 and whilst any crystal balling the future exchange rate is as good as a random walk, the gut feeling is that the Euro will remain stronger vis-a-vis the USD simply on the basis of aggregate confidence that fuels aggregate demand and the market supply of the respective currencies.

Why has the Euro strengthens against the USD or why had the USD weakened against the Euro since the advent of the Euro in 2000AD?

Before one can even attempt to answer this simple question, a tour of history and grounding of the mechanics behind the intricate linkages of currencies, exchange rate to trade, debts, settlement of accounts, currency trading & speculation and economics is essential.

Back to Basics: Back to Barter

Prior to the invention of money, trade and exchanges of goods and services between individuals are based on the premise of free and fair value transactions and assuming that it is in the context of a free market, exchanges occur only when agreements are met. In other words, it is only when the both parties in the single transaction agrees to the terms and conditions supporting the transaction, then only can the transaction be completed and settled.

For example, if I have a few extra live chickens that I would like to exchange for say, some vegetables which I do not grow myself, I will approach my neighbor farmer if he would like to exchange his vegetables for chickens. If the answer is affirmative, the question that follows is at what parity? That is how much vegetables can I expect to get in exchange for a live chicken.

We may haggle or we may just agree on the spot and he gets my chicken and I get his vegetables at a mutually agreed exchange rate and totally without the use of money. This is known as "barter trade" and commonly done before the advent of money and still carried out today, locally as well as between individuals from two different countries.

Trading with money vis-a-vis barter trade will obviously manifest itself, the convenience and advantageous of the monetary system.

Money, a token of common accepted media of exchange can be anything, real or virtual, what matters is both buyer and seller mutually accepts the tokens for the exchange of goods and services.

Money therefore can be in the form of a signature as in the backing of a valid Credit Card a.k.a. "plastics", cowrie shells, gold, silver and even electronic credits as in phone and internet credits.

In the days of old, it is not uncommon for individual domains to trade internally with paper money, but beyond its own borders, the sovereign paper money is not worth even the cost of the paper that was printed on.

Opium

A classic case in point is the famous "Opium Wars" or Anglo-Chinese Wars between England and China in the mid 19th Century (First Opium War from 1839 to 1842and the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860).

To cut a long story short, the problem was the imbalance of trade and payments between two sovereign countries: England and China.

The English, addicted to tea, a commodity only available in China, discovered that silver, the only form of money China wants in exchange for tea, is fast flying out from England to China as tea flows into England.

Realizing that England is in dire straits, England tried to convince China to buy English cotton goods and other products in exchange for tea. The Chinese refused on grounds that the Chinese has no lack of or desire to have English products.

Convincing the Chinese to accept British Pounds in paper money was also a non mover because only gold and silver is the only accepted form of payment for international trade back then.

The problem escalated into the English addicting the Chinese with British Indian grown opium and in a matter of decades, the reverse flow of silver from China to England as opium poured into China forced the Chinese to take drastic actions to ban the consumption of opium.

This trade war culminated in two Opium Wars resulting in an unmodernized China being carved out by the European colonizers and even her neighbor, modernizing Japan.

The American Dream; The World's Nightmare

In the days of old, paper currencies are backed by gold and silver, so no governments, no matter how corrupt could irresponsibly print money without any backing.

However, at the turn of the 2oth Century and with the passing of two world wars and the Great USA Depression and the world in turmoil, a solution has to be found and the backing of printed money by gold was reckoned to be unsustainable, illogical and stifling.

The Americans decoupled the USD from any backing of precious metals like gold and adopted the "a fait" system: i.e. based on trust or "faith".

With the decoupling and easing of the monetary supply by the "a fait" printing of money, stimulus spending etc, USD was brought out of the great depression of the 1930's.

Since then many other countries had followed the example do the USA and taken their currencies off the backing of any precious metal and issue them ala "a fait".

With the meteorite rise of the US economy and international trade post Second War World, the adoption of the USD as the de-factor global currency became an entrenched phenomenon until the advent of the Euro alternative in 2000AD.

The easing and therefore the availability of easy money and credit did accelerated the growth of the US as well as the global economy vis-a-vis had it have to be tandem with the rate of the discover and refinery of precious metals.

Without the stifling of the economy by the physical production of precious metal, the 2oth century saw the unprecedented and simultaneous growth the economies in diverse places like post WWII Germany and Japan aside from the USA.

But the system of the a fait money is by no means without its inherent problems.

Faith requires honesty and honesty is indeed a rare commodity, be it personal or in an organization called the "government".

When government starts to fiddle with the monetary system and overprint money so that they can spend frivolously, the lost of value of printed money or inflation is the inevitably consequence as we can see in the Zimbabwe economy of late under President Robert Mugabe.

Faith money prerequisites honest governments and if the leader (USA) is far from honest herself, one wonders how can other developing world's leader can be expected to follow otherwise.

As I write today, 7th October, 2009, jitters around the world over the imminent fall in exchange value of the USD starting with the dumping of USD by oil exporting nations like Saudi Arabia, has caused the USD to drop and gold commodity price (again denominated in USD) to rise.

Why has the love for the USD turned so sour lately?

Confidence or rather the lack of it.

The consensus nowadays is that the USD is unsustainable because it is issued based on nothing but 100% faith in the USA and her economy, and with the US economy now in shambles, it does not take a fool to dump the USD for anything else including gold, Euros, commodities etc.

For nations who keep their savings, surpluses and reserves in USD, the erosion of wealth via the weakening of the USD is utmost unnerving.

At the same time, it is a catch 22 situation.

The unison ditching of the USD by all will only cause the USD to fall further but on the other hand, the fear of being the last person holding the unwanted hot potato is an unwelcome nightmare of default by inaction.

Amongst the biggest losers of a weakening USD are countries that had invested heavily in US bonds having gained from exchanging goods and service with USA for a fait USD.

Normally, no fool will be dumb enough to exchange goods and services for mere pieces of printed papers and for so long are there are people out there willing to accept USD as money, the crisis of confidence does not exist and the USD remains bankable.

What if indeed the USD does not command any more confidence?

Well, unless world trade ceases in concert with the USD, there will still be need of a global currency or currencies to facilitate trade and avoid the loss in currency exchange.

Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea

Would the Euro be the replacement to the USD?

It could very well be, but there is no guarantee that the Euro would not go down the same road as the USD.

These symptoms are manifestations of a larger and more insidious global economic problem festered by dishonestly, greed and corruption.

The biliions and billions of dollars that are presumably "lost" in the global economic crisis is still too baffling.

Where have all the money gone to?

Surely not into the thin air.

If its mere "paper losses" due to valuation bubble, it can be accepted, but with actualized gains that are "lost" attributable to the payment of vulgar bonuses and compensations, it is sinfully wrong.

With the lessons learned from the 2008 Global Economic Crisis, I would hope that the world leaders would have come to realize that the old economic model is broken and unsustainable.

While the world gropes in the dark from the global economic brown out, hopefully, world leaders will begin to take a long term view and start rebuilding the global economy based not on a "business as usual" paradigm; but a sustainable system of real and honest economics.

While we hope, we pray the world leaders would have the moral courage to do what is right and good for the people in the long run.

May God help us all, we need it.

Two Deaths Won't One Life Resurrect

2009-04-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

Another of PH's thots on the sentencing of the two policemen accused of shooting and blasting the Mongolian Model, Altantuya Shararibu:

================================================================
Two Deaths Won't One Life Resurrect
written by Penumpang Halal, April 09, 2009
I am personally against the death sentence because it serves no other purpose, save an economic one: since it is cheaper to exterminate than to incarcerate and further more, dead people tell no tales.

These two poor souls may be the "kaki-tangans" that executed the killing and the disposal of evidence, but who is the "kepala" who ordered the execution?

There can be no justice without truth and where justice is not done or seen to be done, it engenders fertile grounds for alternative forms of justice contrary to what we have constitutionally bind ourselves to abide.

The slide down the slippery slope of perceived institutionalized injustice is steep and insidious, it seeks to corrode the very ties that binds society together through shared common values in law and order.

Oh, may sanity and rationality prevails in our midst, still.
================================================================

BNM's Zeti, "Zeti: Economy strong enough to take downturn"

2009-03-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

As reported in the Press:

KUALA LUMPUR, March 26 — Bank Negara Malaysia yesterday acknowledged that the country would experience the full impact of the global downturn this year, but painted a picture of an economy sufficiently resilient to withstand the external shocks should conditions worsen. (snipped)

==========

Penumpang Halal's Counterpoint:

============
Strength is Relative, Prophetess!
written by Penumpang Halal, March 26, 2009
The Prophetess may have just prophesied that, "The Malaysian Economy is Strong Enough to Take Downtown".

That statement begs for 2 more nervous questions:

1. How Strong (or Weak) is the Malaysian Economy
2. How Strong (or Weak) is the Anticipated Downturn and How Long Will the Downturn Be?

In 2007-2008, buoyant market priced Malaysian Oil financed more than 40% of the Malaysian Budgeted Expenditure.

With Oil having lost more than half of its market price vis-a-vis its peak, how much more oil must Malaysia sell to raise the same amount of revenue to finance the identical amount of budget expenditure?

But then again, Malaysia is no Switzerland whose currency is still backed by gold and like USA, Malaysia can gear up the printing press to print more money, because unbacked money is like what it says on the US Note: "In God We Trust".

Great, but other than "God", should we trust anyone else?

Well, unfortunately, it is dead silent on that!

===============

Proverbial Boiled Frogs

2009-03-25T20:33:00.000-07:00

One of the most valuable lessons in life I learn and applied from school books is the experiment on frogs (or toads rather).

Toads and Frogs are cold blooded amphibians and unlike mammals like humans; amphibians cannot regulate their body temperature, but rely on external sources of heat like sunlight and ambient temperature to regulate their body temperature for survival purposes.

Therefore, if you throw a frog or a toad into a basin of warm water (approximately 36degreesC), they will immediately jump out through reflex instincts.

However, if you place them in a basin of room temperature water, they will just remain in it, even when you start to heat up the water on a stove.

They will just continue to enjoy the cozy jacuzzi of warm water until they are literally boiled to death.

Humans are largely creatives of habits and more often than not, for want of diligence, we end up as proverbial boiled frogs in the comforts of our cozy habits.

Amidst the negative ambiance against "hopping" or "lompat" in the current political scenario of Malaysia, there are indeed merits for hopping out of our insidious comfort zones or die a nice slow boiled death.

So, politicians and people out there, it is OK to jump, hop or "lompat', if survival necessitates it!

Dr. Wee KS & Chinese Education

2009-02-24T18:40:00.000-08:00

Another interesting post from Penumpang Halal, this time about Dr. Wee's veiled treat on withdrawing $$$$$ support for a Chinese primary school should they invite the state government representatives to their school function:

===========
Datuk Wee, Please Don't Wee On Yourself
written by Penumpang Halal, February 24, 2009

Bravo, MCA SS2 lead by its Chairman Mr. Lee Chong Beng.

Well said.

If MCA cannot represent the very interest the party is supposed to champion, the grassroot will switch over to other parties who can a better job.

Datuk Wee must not wee on the people who supports him or the people will wee on him and the party he represents.

The time of "There is Only One Choice" is gone, swap away by the tsunami of March2008, so for people like Datuk Wee, let the people free and let the people wee!

=====================

No Justice Without Equality

2009-02-18T08:01:00.000-08:00

Look what I found on http://www.malaysiainsider.com.

So good that I must replicate here:

=============
No Justice Without Equality
written by Penumpang Halal, February 18, 2009
Granted all of us are unique (no two humans has identical thumb print!) and there are obvious differences in the Gender, that does not make us unequal when rights are concerned.

All persons are equal before the law and whether you want to believe that some laws are "God given" and some "Man made", all laws are humans implemented.

Herbert Spenser, the English sage said, ""Laws whether written or unwritten, formulate the rule of the dead over the living. In addition to that power which past generations exercise over present generations, by transmitting their natures,--bodily and mental,--and in addition to the power they exercise over them by bequeathed habits and modes of life, there is the power they exercise through their regulations for public conduct, handed down orally, or in writing. . . . I emphasize these truths,"--he adds,--"for the purpose of showing that they imply a tacit ancestor-worship."

Alas, what the women is fighting for is actually futile, because the "rights of men" are enshrined above that of women in the holy books.

What is needed is a shift in paradigm and a change in mindset and that include even to the drastic step of not having the religion that one, who had chose not to belong to by one's freewill e.g. "by birth".

Simple solution, in a democracy, people have personal freedom and that includes rights to personal choice and privacy: Just Leave and be Free to or not to associate.

This is the 21st Century which no obsolete paradigms, methods, systems and mindsets can help solve modern days problems: modern day problems need modern day solutions, that is why Homo-sapiens are have better brains and are supposed to be the fitter survivals in the Cycle of Life where it is a game of the Survival of the Fittest (another of Herbert Spenser's coined terms).

Want to know how liberal and pragmatic some other people from other parts of the world have shifted their paradigms and changed their mindsets?

Well, feast your eyes and change your mindset:

http://www.asiaone.com/Travel/News/Story/A1Story20080331-57109.html

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Creation or Evolution?

2009-02-08T23:36:00.000-08:00

Some kind soul sent me the below article and I responded in reciprocation.

Enjoy!

Question:

============

We are often asked whether we believe the Creation account in the first chapter of Genesis should be understood as a literal six-day creation. Some Christians believe that if a person doesn’t believe that God created everything in six literal days, then they are denying both God and the Bible.

But it is important to remember that some parts of the Bible are intended to be understood literally and some parts are intended to be understood figuratively. In fact, some 40 percent of the Bible consists of poetry and metaphors, and these are intended to be taken figuratively, not literally. And the figurative parts are every bit as true as the literal parts.

For example, God is not a literal hen, rock, tower, or shepherd, even though the Bible describes God in such terms.

We have to remember that the writer of Genesis 1 lived at a time when common oral (and eventually written) traditions included mythic creation epics that presented the stars, the planets, the sun, moon, land, sea and animals as gods. Some of these creation epics began with a pre-existent mound out of which the first god springs, who then in one way or another produces the other gods. Another variation has the sea as the first god. Such epics were the standard approach to explaining the original of the known universe.

Contrast that with the Creation story in Genesis 1. The Genesis account uses the standard style of creation epics of the ancient world. But it makes the radical declaration that the God of Israel, completely unlike all the gods of the nations, did not emerge from anything, nor was he ever part of the universe.

Quite the contrary, Genesis declares that this God created everything out of nothing simply by the power of his word. Each of the things thought of by the nations as being gods is systematically presented in Genesis as having been created by this God, and then being declared “good” by this God, demonstrating his utter power over them.

In other words, Genesis 1 is about the Who of Creation, not the how. Genesis 1 is making a profound theological statement to us about who God is as Creator in contrast to the gods of the nations. We should not try to interpret it as providing us some kind of literal scientific record of how and when God did it.

The biblical revelation tells us that the God who revealed himself to Israel and who has revealed himself to humanity in Jesus Christ is the Creator of all that exists. This means that nothing factual that science can say about the universe needs to be in conflict with the biblical revelation – as long as the scientific interpretation doesn’t conclude that God is not the Creator of all that exists.

Scientists, using whatever evidence is available, seek to better understand the wonders of the amazing universe God has brought into being. Since God is the creator of all that is, whatever science finds to be true about the universe or about life itself, is simply a discovery about some aspect of what God has done.

As Christians, we have no need to be afraid of or skeptical of what science discovers, because all truth is God’s truth, and all true science is God’s science.

==================

Answer:

Hi ....

To me it is futile to debate on the issue of Bible creation story vs the so called "scientific" discovery of evolution theory because all these are prehistorical events, the past, period!

What is critical now is the future which can be influenced by what we do or do not do in the present.

Present the Creation Story as part of the whole Gospel of salvation by and through Jesus Christ alone as the solution to an impending problem of Sin through the Fall.

If people, after hearing the Gospel, accept, believe and repent, Praise be unto God, if they reject, that is there God given right and if they choose to believe in "scientific evolution", let them find salvation in the scientific theory, that is their right and also their destiny.

Let us not be like some modern Pharisee who insist that man are not mammals because we are not animals.

Man are mammals because we share the common attributes of scientifically coined criteria, but man can fail to be humans if we behave like animals as seen lately how politics have become in Malaysia.

Regards,
...
=======================

A Wonderful Speech is It?

2009-01-23T22:23:00.000-08:00

I received an email from a long time friend and in it contained the former PM of Australia, John Howard's speech to the UN.

My friend claimed it to be wonderful; I beg to differ and would classify it as unhelpful.

The reason is one immigrant cannot ask another immigrant to leave; but to understand why people are as they are and so long as they seek no violence in there struggles, we should live side by side amidst diversity.

My reply to my friend is below the posting:

==========================================

IT'S A WONDERFUL SPEECH………
Hi ,
The views of Patriotic Australian Prime Minister....
THE UNITED NATION Needs A Leader Like This !

Prime Minister John Howard - Australia

Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to get out of Australia , as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks.

Separately, Howard angered some Australian Muslims on Wednesday by saying he supported spy agencies monitoring the nation's mosques. Quote: 'IMMIGRANTS, NOT AUSTRALIANS, MUST ADAPT. Take It Or Leave It. I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Bali , we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Australians.'

'This culture has been developed over two centuries of struggles, trials and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom'

'We speak mainly ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society . Learn the language!'

'Most Australians believe in God. This is not some Christian, right wing, political push, but a fact, because Christian men and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our schools. If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home, because God is part of our culture.'

'We will accept your beliefs, and will not question why. All we ask is that you accept ours, and live in harmony and peaceful enjoyment with us.'

'This is OUR COUNTRY, OUR LAND, and OUR LIFESTYLE, and we will allow you every opportunity to enjoy all this. But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about Our Flag, Our Pledge, Our Christian beliefs, or Our Way of Life, I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great Australian freedom, 'THE RIGHT TO LEAVE'.'

'If you aren't happy here then LEAVE. We didn't force you to come here. You asked to be here. So accept the country YOU accepted.'

Maybe if we circulate this TO THE WHOLE WORLD- IT MAY GIVE the backbone to start speaking and voicing the same truths FOR THE PEACE & LOVE OF MANKIND

IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE.
GREAT EXPECTATION MAY GOD BLESS ALL OF US.
Now go to this website to know more"Why Israel's offensive on gaza?"
www.jcpa.org

John Howard

========================================

Dear Bro. (zapped to protect confidentiality),

John Howard's right to free speech must be respected and I support his right, even though I may not entirely agree with what he said, hopefully he verbalizes what he thinks.

The fundamental issue is still Human's basic right to choice.

For people who wants to be under Sharia, let them vote with their hands and legs and for people who vote for Civil Law, let it be so.

But for John Howard, to demand people to get out when he himself like so many others to Australia are immigrants, is a little way above the top.

A viable democracy is one that embraces and the acid test is how the rights of the minorities are protected for the comfort consumption of the minorities alone, without discriminating the majority by even an iota.

Similarly, transport this back to our beloved home country, Malaysia.

What if one day, the majority demands Sharia and Hudud and tell us, the minority that if we don't like it, we can get out of the country?

Yes, any weapon of aggression can backfire, so, let us be more retrospect in everything we think, say and do, undo or don't do.

Shalom,
Alex Kee

Sustainability = Living Within the Renewable Cycle

2009-01-14T05:47:00.000-08:00

We often use the term "Sustainable & Renewable" without much thought and thinking aloud lately, I wondered what it meant philosophically.

As we are all aware, nothing on Earth is new; everything that existed now had existed in its absolute content quantum, its form may have changed and its content remained conserved just as energy and matter are.

The Law of the Conversation of Matter and Energy states that Energy and Matter cannot be destroyed; they can only be transformed as succinctly expressed by Albert Einstein's E=mc2.

This being the case, we ought not to run out of resources, but the empirical evidence is that we do, and always too.

Take the case of drinking water.

The next time you take a drink, think for a while, it may have been someone's urine and after you have drank it, it may come back as clean recycled fresh water in someone else glass.

How? You may ask.

Well, thanks to the Hydrological Cycle (one of the many major cycles that recycle Earth's resources: the Nitrogen Cycle, the Carbon Cycle etc).

Scientist believe that the quantum of water on Earth has been fixed during the Jurassic Period and there are no new water; just fresh recycled water, compliments from the Sun.

Used water evaporated under the power of the Sun to form clouds that fall as precipitation: rain, snow, hail etc that fills up rivers and get treated to become potable water for us.

Conceptually, we ought not to run out of fossil fuel too, but the reality is because unlike water, the recycling gestation period of oil is not in a matter of weeks, months, years, decades or centuries but eons!

Therefore, when we run out of clean potable water, let us realize that this ought not be the case because the Recycling Cycle is within Renewability; it is our abuse and/or overuse that pushes it beyond its sustainability.

As Gandhi puts it, "The world has enough resources to satisfy our needs; never our greed".

So, use resources wisely and judiciously, always within its renewability cycle so as to remain sustainable, for our sake, our children' sake and our children' children' sake.

Mangkali or Punjabi: Misnomer or Malice Meant?

2008-04-16T23:52:00.000-07:00

The Sikh Community has just celebrated their new year about a week ago and the newly appointed Chief Minister of Perak, Mohd. Nizar who ignorantly referred the Sikh as "Bengali" where it should have been "Punjabi" in a Sikh Temple celebration, came under fire, big time from certain quarters, Sikh and non Sikh alike, but was also defended by others, Sikh and non Sikh too.

While the fresh Chief Minister may have made a blunder by using the wrong description, does he deserve such condemnation when it is common knowledge that the Chinese Community in Malaysia had always and still do address the Sikhs as "Mangkali" which sounds like "Bengali".

To the Sikhs who originate from Punjab, I can understand why they would detest being called "Mangkali" which sounded like "Bengali", given that Punjab is in the West of India, closer to West Pakistan (now called merely Pakistan) and Bengal is in the East, closer to East Pakistan, now seceded and independent from Pakistan and has adopted the name "Bangladesh".

But the Chinese Community has always refer the conspicuous Sikh who wears a Sikh turban as "Mangkali" and poor Nizar couldn't really be faulted for using the wrong term, even granted as a Chief Minister (albeit newly minted) he ought to show less "man of the street's" ignorance.

My take on the phenomenon is the inherent phonic articulation inability of Chinese tongue in pronouncing certain sounds like "R" and "L", "V" and "B", "Z" and "J".

For example, it is not uncommon for the Chinaman to say, "Bely Good" instead of "Very Good", "Lulian" instead of "Durian". Therefore, Punjabi could be mistakenly pronounced as "Mangkali" because Sikhs address brothers as "Bai" or "Vai" and it follows that "Punjabi" morphs into "Baikali" and then to "Mangkali".

Well, this is only my hypothesis and is subject to further etymological scrutiny by any interested experts out there.

Karpal Singh, who, as a modern Singh is never seen in typical Singh garb turban except on a special day like the Sikh New Year was classic in his defense for the newly minted Chief Minister.

I like how Karpal puts it with style and compassion. Plagiarizing William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (II, ii, 1-2), he said, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose? By any other name would smell as sweet." How true!

If my memory serves me right, I have never read in the Press and seen on mass media, a Chief Minister, especially a Muslim (and from a Muslim inspired political party like PAS) entered a place of worship except a mosque and to even officiate the opening of a religious ceremony like Vaisakhi or Baisakhi in a Sikh Temple, is truly a sign of goodwill and humility.

Alas, there are some within and without who took extreme offense and demanded for the Chief Minister's blood, if not head for a common mistake held by the masses.

Nizar has apologized for the mistake and to me, the whole accident ought to be just forgiven and forgotten, because malice was never intended, it was a genuine accident out of a habitual use of a term.

This incident is like one that was told to me when I was working as an Insurance Agent in the 1980s.

The scene was a classroom and the lesson was "cookery". The Cookery Class Teacher held up high a Rastali banana and asked the class, "Girls, do you know what banana this is?".

The class bimbo quickly got up, put up her hand and shouted, "Indian Banana, teacher".

The whole class broke into laughter, the teacher included.

The poor girl was puzzled. It definitely looks like a "Keh Leng Chio" or "Indian Banana" in Hokkien, so what is so funny?

The same goes for the "Indian Temple" instead of "Hindu Temple" and "Malay New Year" instead of "Hari Raya Idil Fitri".

Funny, me think, if some Sikh and non Sikh can be easily offended by such honest accidental mistakes, they ought to take offense when a non Sikh puts on a Sikh Turban in a Sikh Temple, but then, Mr. Lim Eng Guan, the newly minted Chief Minister of Penang, do look undoubtedly cute with it, and so does our Karpal Singh, Esq.

I wonder how they will look in Taliban styled turbans though, but then, as garb doesn't make a man or a woman, it does not matter.

A Rose will smell like a rose, no matter by what you call it and a Sikh will always be a Sikh even when Punjab is split into half Indian and half Pakistani and by what name you can him, Punjabi, Mangkali, Bai or even Bengali.

नमस्त
(Namasté)

Fishing in Troubled Waters

2007-11-14T06:34:00.000-08:00

I received a phone call from a stranger purportedly based in China, trying to interest me into investing in fuel oil futures.

He claims that fuel oil prices in the USA is bound to rise given the higher and bigger demand for winter heating because of the anticipated colder winter, low stock levels and higher crude oil prices.

I protested to him that with people like him speculating in the fuel oil futures and with no viable alternatives in sight, fuel oil prices will have no other way but to go up, unless of course the US government releases it stockpile to drive down market prices.

Heating oil to keep alive in the winters in countries is a necessity. It is like water in desert climates. Withholding or profiteering in basic commodities to can mean life or death to people is the greatest crime anyone can commit.

If I make money at the expense of someone else suffering, is this humane?

What is the root objection to usury, precisely because it enslaves the poor to poverty when to the contrary, we ought to help the poor to feed, clothe and keep themselves warm when they are not able to.

If fuel oil prices become unaffordable to many in the cold countries, be prepared to see a rise in the number of deaths and all thanks to the hike in oil prices exacerbated by speculators in commodities.

We all know that fossil fuel is not sustainable but the harsh reality that in the short run there is no real alternatives to it but to gain at someone else losses is to me, adding another misery on suffering people.

Sin & the Sinner

2007-08-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

I received an appeal from one Pastor Allen Tan urging Christians in Malaysia to "nib the problem of starting a gay church in Malaysia at its bud".

Apparently there is one Pastor Oyoung Wen Feng commissioned by strong American support is tasked to starting a gay church in Malaysia.

Pastor Allen Tan is urging Christians from various denominations to unite to stop it from happening, even to the extent of urging the government of Malaysia to intervene on the basis that homosexual activities subvert the government's efforts and millions of ringgits investment in stemming out the HIV-AIDS problem because, according to Rev Tan, AIDS-HIV is caused by homosexual acts.

Pastor Tan seems to have taken it upon himself with crusading fervor to eradicate the budding of any gay church in Malaysia to the extent of using any ways and means to achieve his end believing he had a mandate from God to eradicate the ungodly from the face of the earth, phew, with fervor reminiscing those of the infamous Taliban!

While I am in agreement with the Bible that homosexual acts like other sexual sins e.g. bestiality, fornication and adultery is forbidden to all, Christians or non-Christians alike, we ought to be realistic and acknowledge the fact that as redeemed sinners, we are still on the way towards holiness and are still continuing to struggle with sin, whether we confess it to our other fellow brethren or not.

Do we grant church fellowship to people only if they are "good enough" to be associated with us, or do we accept people in good faith and based on face value that they have, like us, have taken a step of faith in following Jesus Christ though confession, repentance, desiring and working diligently on becoming a disciple of Christ even though we by faith are already Christ's disciples?

What if one day, someone we know as a brother or sister, with whom we have fellowship approach us with a confession of a sexual sin that he or she is struggling with and seeking our help to overcome it?

Do we push him/her away like lepers or do we weep with them and extend that hand of support to carry our brother through because he is our brother that we ought not to abandon in his hour of need?

There would not have been a place for any gay church had the conventional churches provide a place in their congregation to rehabilitate people who repents and are working towards overcoming their specific areas of weaknesses in their lives.

People like Oyoung may have the agenda to establish some kind of a church that runs contrary to the basic teachings and values of the Bible, maybe like a Jewish sect that advocates the eating of pork, but to then pressure a secular government to intervene in what is precisely a religious matter is inviting a "kick-me" ridicule.

What ought to be our response then?

The criminal laws of Malaysia, inherited from the British, which relied upon the values of the Church of England provides for the specific punishment of homosexual acts (acts of carnal knowledge).

This is the same law that Dr. Mahathir, the retired Prime Minister of Malaysia used to get the courts to convict and fire his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim.

But this is a matter of the law and their are sufficient provisions in the Penal Code to punish people who practices homosexual acts in Malaysia, be it committed privately or publicly.

Even if Oyoung or some others manage to get his gay church established, ought we be ashamed because he claim it to be a Christian Church?

Labels ought not trouble us, decent people know what decency is and rubbish smells like and the substance of garbage no matter how it is masked or disguised.

People will be able to discern the truth from falsehood by reasoning.

If truth cannot be established by reasoning; then truth it ought not be.

We cannot forbid religious freedom (no matter how contrary it is to our own liking) in Malaysia because it is enshrined in our secular Constitution that protects all, us included.

We can only attempt to enlighten people on the love of God that desires us to lead happy, healthy and fulfilling lives and for that, He guides us through His wisdom, precepts upon precepts, a little here, a little there.

Let us build our communities to be strong and true to our Lord.

An abundant life in Christ Jesus experienced needs no other distraction, even of the strange kind like same sex acts.

Below is my reply to a concerned brother:

Dear Bro. Lim,
Thank you for forwarding the two emails regarding the same issue.

My first reaction is "Wow"! Seems like the "vernacular" Chinese newspapers are more current than the mainstream English and Bahasa Malaysia newspapers in Malaysia in covering such "hot issues" like "gay churches" that will help sell their newspapers and benefit their shareholders and employees!

I think the attempt to stop or ban people from discussing or establishing churches, temples or any other institutions of religious or moral persuasion other than ours is utmost condescending at best and bigotry at worst.

I am not acquainted with one Rev. Allen Tan, but I could literally smell that blood thirsty sword of judgment in his hands to mete out "God's justice" like the famous Justice Pow of Kaifeng of old and ala maybe the Taliban of modern day Afghanistan trapped in their 7thCentury archaic time frozen mindset.

Malaysia's Constitution is secular and thank God it is.

This same Constitution that guarantees religious freedom for all is like a double edged sword that cuts both ways, it is impartial and a respecter of no persons, this is the essence of the Rule of Law, a tenet of modern civilization so sacred that without which the foundation of justice cannot stand.

If we start to poke the government to ban what we think is "unchristian", we are writing a blank cheque of precedence for our own persecution.

Ponder for a moment, do we forbid churches that preaches a different gospel other than ours, even one that denies the deity of Christ?

Churches that teach us to abstain from eating and drinking certain kinds of food and drinks because the Bible (Old Testament) records for the Jews that those are forbidden but the New Testament clearly records for us in the Council of Jerusalem that we Gentiles need no further yoke for what Jesus Christ has emancipated us from?

Churches that still believe in the Apostolic Succession and the continuous practice of the speaking in tongues when it ought to have ceased as a feature of God's intended dispensation for such a phenomenon tagged with an expiry date?

I could go on and on, but I think we ought to have got the point by now.

Leave these people alone but educate our own people on the ways of the Lord.

If we know that homosexual acts is wrong before the sight of God just like any other sexual sins like adultery, fornication and masturbation (?), talk and walk our personal life to match our talk.

By the way, HIV and AIDS is caused by a virus spread by the transfer of body fluids, not necessary exclusive to homosexual acts. It can be transmitted by blood transfusion, sharing of needles, toothbrushes, razor blades and even heterosexual sex.

Recent medical discoveries seem to indicate that HIV transmission amongst circumcised males is less vis-a-vis uncircumcised, so does it mean that we all ought to be circumcised to help slow down the spread of HIV-AIDS and be wanton with our sexual appetite?

No! ABC is still the message: Abstain, Be Faithful to your Spouse and if you cannot be either, wear a Condom!

The beauty of the Christian Church is in its diversity and the tolerance within the ecclesia that had allowed the diversity to blossom.

My take of the situation is simple.

If we are Christ's disciples first and church members second, it does not matter which church I go to or if I go to any church at all.

Church as an organization is supposed to serve society, touch lives and points people to Jesus Christ to also be their Lord and Savior through their own free will.

But alas, look around us and we see the ubiquitous self serving ends of the people with power running the churches and the unbelievable dirt and abuses of pastors and yes man and yes woman leaders lead by their noses.

My own life is a tragic story of church abuse.

I was ex-communicated by a Charismatic Church because I asked:

1. For the church accounts to b externally audited and also published.

2. For open membership to be practiced as stipulated in the church's constitution and

3. For the election of the pastors and office bearers, all these stipulated in the church's constitution but never practiced and forever denied to the "church members".

The biggest joke to silent me was the senior pastor, with help from his cronies, hastily set up a kangaroo court, made up of an equally hastily set up "Elders Board" and "Discipline Committee Board" to hear and judge me in absentia and finally excommunicated me and my family, even though we were not members in the first place!

Not members even after attending the church as pioneers and for more than 20 years.

Not members not because we did not want to, but because the senior pastor deceived us into believing that there is no need for "paper membership", so long as you attend the church, you automatically are members.

How romantic and naive we all were!

How cunningly deceptive this "man of god" is!

I can go on and on about the shameful cover-up, way up the church hierarchy, even way up to Springsfield, Missouri, USA, but I think this should suffice.

Those who knows the truth, will be set free by the truth, although it first has to hurt.

My two sen advise on the matter: the gays and lesbians may not be people we like to associate with, but they are people who Christ died for too.

If we are not prepared to minister to them because we would not touch the uncleaned, let those who have a heart to reach out to these special people do so without our inhibitions.

If Jesus Christ were to be here today, how would he had treat the gays and the lesbians caught in the act and brought by the modern day Pharisees for His judgment?

Would He command them to be condemned with decapitation or would he challenge us (you and me, the onlookers): Let those without sin cast the first stone?

Would you cast the first stone when the He Who knew no sin simply says, "Go and sin no more".

Grace, Amazing Grace that saved a wretch like me, freely we receive, let us also freely give.

Shalom,
Alex Kee

On 8/6/07, SER SHING LIM < lifatt@gmail.com> wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bene Toon < benetoon@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2007 5:44 PM
Subject: Fwd: Gay church issue
To: chian.chomfon@taylors.edu.my, chom_elle@hotmail.com, fuat.sadewa@yahoo.co.id, joseph_thana2001@yahoo.com, kennyltc@yahoo.com, kingjamesmy@yahoo.com , mark_kwan@hotmail.com, mingfei_tan@yahoo.com, nancy@skklog.com.my, pl-sanko@ntti.net.sg, poonpc@yahoo.com, set_success@yahoo.com, yinghui0925@hotmail.com, zephaniahpee@calvary.com.my, zephptk@yahoo.com, Aaron & Vivian ONG < arong@streamyx.com>, Afred Ng < arcpro@tm.net.my>, amos lee <amos_ltc@yahoo.com>, Amy Ding < amyding@a-freight.com>, "Andri DO (Rica Jkt)" < andrido-mkt@ricakusuma.co.id>, andy chua < jb_andychua@yahoo.com.sg>, annabelle chian < annabelle0205@hotmail.com>, Anthony Ong <ong188@gmail.com>, Ban Huat < limbanhuat@yahoo.com>, BK < boonkeat21@yahoo.com>, Bro Dav <jayadev@mmhe.com.my>, Bro Ken < ah_naige@yahoo.com>, Bro Soong Kok Tiong < soongkt@yahoo.com>, Bro Tony <ar9311@hotmail.com>, Bruce & cathie < cathie1@tm.net.my>, Cha Yong < uchayong@tm.net.my>, Chen Long <tansl@miracle.com.my>, Chloe Teo < chloeteo112@yahoo.com>, CqLeong < brightimber@gmail.com>, Daniel Sin <danielsinhf@gmail.com>, Danny Eng < dannyengseetian@yahoo.com.tw>, davidson lawrence < kingjamesmy@gmail.com>, desmiond leong < desmond@flexitrans.com.my>, Doulos Tan <iamdoulos@gmail.com >, Eileen Chee <eileen.chee@csflogistics.com>, en cheng < tiffanym@streamyx.com>, forrestgump forrestgump < ahnaige@hotmail.com>, heo ty < centia40@yahoo.com>, irene Ang <cccjohor@tm.net.my>, Jimmy Chan < jabez.marketing@gmail.com>, joseph dowd < joseph.dowd@gmail.com>, Joshua Lim <arthome@pd.jaring.my >, Joshua Lim <thteokk@streamyx.com>, Kelvin Ng < kelngtop1@gmail.com>, LARRY < larrylms@pd.jaring.my>, Lau Kui Min Usana <dssmin@yahoo.com.sg>, Mark Kwan < sojournm@gmail.com>, matthew soon < wecare777@yahoo.com.sg>, nelson peter <nelson.shalom@gmail.com>, nelson peter < shalomnps@yahoo.com>, Ninan < cninan@gmail.com>, Paul Rajan <apexrecycle@yahoo.com.my>, "Ps. Shi Shin" < kennethchwa@yahoo.com.sg>, " Ps.Daniel Chow" <ccctampoi@yahoo.com>, "Ps. Ernie" < ernie_4jc@hotmail.com>, "Ps. PeiSan" < cccsuria@time.net.my>, "ps.Thomas fang" <ysfang@tm.net.my>, "Rev. Allen TAN" < yhjohn@streamyx.com>, Ricky Lim < ksljulie@hotmail.com>, Rudi Senjaya < senjaya@telkom.net>, Rui Fu <jleedavid@yahoo.com>, samuel Tan < samuel17@tm.net.my>, sathis nair < superb_sn2003@yahoo.com>, simon ho <hermerz@streamyx.com >, sis malini <mr9311@hotmail.com>, SSLim < lifatt@gmail.com>, Tan Boon Joo <bjtan_jb5@yahoo.com.sg >, Tan Guan <tg@ecoprint.com.my>, Timothy Siow < ica2000@tm.net.my>, victor eng < xxlgreenpower@gmail.com>, vincentia <yyan63@yahoo.com>, Vivian Ai fen < aifen_tng@yahoo.com.sg>, Wee Yong Fook < livingstone@pd.jaring.my>, wenchi <kohboonchee@gmail.com>, wenshiong < mhyap@dailyfresh.com.my>, wong et yong < etyong2002@yahoo.com.sg>, yap choon ping <yapfrance@yahoo.com>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Allen Tan <yhjohn@streamyx.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2007 2:50 PM
Subject: Gay church issue
To: NECF <editor@necf.org.my>, Wong Kim Kong < necf@po.jaring.my>
Cc: Ding Mee Heyong < gracedmh@hotmail.com>, Nancy Lai <nancy_seowkian@hotmail.com>, "Amy Lee (Antioch)" < amamy@tm.net.my>, Andrew Wong < holisticteam@yahoo.com>, Christopher Mun < chrismun@pd.jaring.my>, Edward Chui < rev.edward.chui@gmail.com>, elizabeth <elizabeth@hktt.com>, Lum Chee Wah < cheewah_l@bursamalaysia.com>, Joshua Lee < fct@po.jaring.my>, Susan Tang < admin@station-of-life.org>, Tryphena Law <trylaw@hotmail.com >, Tracy Ng <tracynkc8@yahoo.com>, Bene Chian < benetoon@gmail.com>

Aug 6 2007

Dear Rev Wong Kim Kong,

Thank you for replying me through Sister Sandy via a sms. Since you are not taking actions, I will work with some others to pursue the matter. Many churches and ministers are looking up to NECF for help. They still think the best party is NECF. What for NECF organizes praying and fasting for 40 days for the nation, and now when this crucial issue propped up which required your prompt action, you are not willing to do anything? I am sure that such gay-agenda being propped up was the result of our Christians' prayers. You know God chose to expose them right in the period of your 40-day fast so that you can take a prompt action! As such, Pastors are disappointed with your reply.

Though the gays in the talk do not practice the act, don't you see that this is the budding time? And soon it will come out with the fruits. If we could foresee that they are bad fruits, should not we do something now? Which way is easier, to nip the buds now, or to tend to sick people who consumed the fruits later?

Yes, it is good to see the Muslims taking action against homosexuality. But I feel that we Christians should be the first person to be aware of the deadly sting of it. We should be the first to take initiative to work with government. I am sure the government is very pleased with us to alert them of the vice being taking place in the country. The government is spending billions of Ringgits in treating the HIV and sex-related diseases! They are definitely not willing to see youths involved in all these perversions. I hope that you are not upset with me over my opinion. I only see that upholding the principles of the Bible is important when the society needs us.

Thank you. God bless you.

P.S. Aug 7 at noon, some pastors would meet up and see what to do next.

Rev. Allen Tan

Aug 5 2007

Dear Pastors, Bro & Sis,

Updates on Gay Church in Malaysia

Shalom!

Thank you for your concern about the gay church. Prior to his two meetings on Aug 11 & 12 at Grand Olympic Hotel (near Merdeka Stadium KL), Oyoung Wen Feng is having a road-show for 5 days from Aug 5 to 9 at Penang, Johor Baru, KL & Singapore. Again Sin Chew Jit Poh made the publicity on Aug 5. This shows that Oyoung is aggressive in pushing through the Gay-agenda in Malaysia.

If we do not stop him now, pretty soon Malaysia will have many gay churches. A pastor told me that Rev. Troy Perry has planted 200 gay churches in America. Is it true? Could anyone give us the answer especially those who are in America? Their church is Metropolitan Community Church – New York. By the way, Troy is not the senior pastor, but the founder of MCCNY. The senior pastor is Rev Bumgardner. Please check Oyoung's website about his road-shows:

http://www.o-young.com/html/activity.htm

Very soon, our friends and relatives would be invited to attend the weddings of their members. Alamak, their spouse is of the same sex! Very soon, all our true churches will have real struggles with youth ministry. We pray that youth pastors would work harder because we are fighting for souls with gay churches.

Some of you asked me about two things: 1. Who Joseph was. 2. Getting NECF to help. Here are the answers:

1. I called Joseph and he is a Christian. When asked which church he attends, he was evasive. This shows that he has no confidence to face the public about his church membership. I exchanged sms with him asking him to repent. But he was upset with me, and he said that we Christians have no guts to do something to the unjust in our country, and instead we all prevent sinners to build relationship with God. It is obvious that he was misled by Oyoung.

When Christians spoke against homosexuality, Oyoung will accuse the church for persecuting them. The church welcomes all gays and lesbians, but we don't condone their actions. These people do not face the reality to have their lifestyle changed. Instead they set up gay churches because they have the wrong ideas that churches as whole persecuted them.

2. I sent a letter to NECF, Rev Wong KK, he replied through sms: 'Rev Allen Tan, this is Sandy from NECF, Rev Wong KK has read and understood your letter. His response is that NECF will help churches to educate their members but is unable to push the govt to ban the talk. The reason is that NECF's stand to the govt is in support of religious liberty. Asking for a ban based on our own beliefs goes against this and may have other repercussions. However, the homosexual act is a criminal offence in Malaysia so you may want to report the matter to the police. (Only that no actual act is committed during the talk, so it may not work.) Rev Wong hopes that you understand the situation and thank you for your concern for the Body of Christ. Thank you.'

I want to thank those who responded to me through calls and emails expressing their supports. And at the same time they are forwarding my mail to some Christian groups which practiced justice. Some gave me some suggestions. I hope we will come out with some solutions. Stopping gay-ministry is a long-term wrestling with Oyoung and his group. Though we may not be on-time to stop his two meetings now, we hope that his work would not be established in Malaysia.

Thank you and God bless you.

Rev. Allen Tan

Affirmative Action, Sustainable?

2007-08-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

The STAR on 03Aug2007, reported UMNO Youth deputy chief Khairy Jamaludin accusing Anwar Ibrahim, "A traitor to the Malay cause":

========================

Anwar a traitor to Malay cause, says Khairy

KUALA KANGSAR: Umno Youth has labelled Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim – who was once head of the movement – a traitor to the Malay cause.

In making the declaration, Umno Youth deputy chief Khairy Jamaludin said: “The (coming) general elections is not about politics but the future of the Malays.”

“Anwar is a puppet of the United States and the Jews, thus he must be hounded until there is no more place for him to run to,” he told a state Umno Youth gathering on Wednesday night.

Among the 5,000 people present were the wing’s former chief Datuk Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, who is also Deputy Information Minister, and Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Mohd Tajol Rosli Ghazali.

Khairy said the movement was angered by Anwar’s persistence in wanting to do away with the New Economic Policy, a cause close to the hearts of the Malays.

“He wanted to abolish it simply because he wanted to win the support of the non-Malays,” he said.

=snipped=

==========================

While we all know how dirty real politics can be and let it be known on the onset that I side nobody politically, my business is in sustainable development, I am deeply perturbed by the intellectual caliber of a purported Oxford U graduate.

The context of the NEP (New Economic Policy) was a time sensitive affirmative action program to eradicate (Malay) poverty and restructure (Malaysian) society, an aftermath of the racial riots of 1969, and not a subject of the social contract negotiated at the promulgation of the Malayan-Malaysian Constitution at the founding of independent Malaya in1957.

The NEP which sets out to help the poor as classified by race (exclusively the Malays) was supposed to be for a limited period of 20 years i.e. 1970 to 1990. It was never intended to be for eternity, but it now looks like the people who benefits directly from this convenient conduit of financial wealth are bent on perpetuating it.

When Anwar Ibrahim insisted NEP to be abolished, it presumable caused such a stir, at least on one UMNO member Khairy Jamaludin, the son-in-law of PM Ahmad Badawi.

Well, it did not moved me a bit.

I am more interested in what Anwar Ibrahim propose the NEP be replaced with.

Affirmative action has its place in every nation and at anytime, because abject poverty is a respecter of no color but of class and the station of life.

Technically, anyone is a candidate for abject poverty, so affirmative action ought not be bias towards race but class: if you are poor enough and qualify to receive aid, you ought to be helped, not because you are poor AND belong to a certain color, but because you are poor, period.

By insisting the NEP be abolished (and hopefully be replaced with a EOEP: Equal Opportunity Economic Policy?), Anwar Ibrahim, in my humble opinion is not fishing for non-Malay votes.

He instead is being true and honest, walking his talk as an authentic Malay Warrior: Keeping his word: "Kata Mesti Di Kota".

Lest we forget, UMNO, through PM Tun Razak had promised that the NEP is for a fixed time period of 20 years and ought to have lapsed by 1990.

Alas, Tun Razak has passed away long ago, otherwise it will be interesting to know what he thinks about extending the NEP forever, when it has matured.

By renegading on its words, UMNO not only dishonors the honesty of the Bangsa, it also implicates the integrity of what the Ugama preaches versus what is practiced by its Ummah and therefore the Negara as the other citizens watches the leaders of that Bangsa in the way they walk their talk.

It is already difficult under normal circumstances for one to do the right thing, and to do the right thing even when it hurts, that is the mark of a Hero, peers of great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln.

Anwar Ibrahim is taking a big gamble by insisting on abolishing the NEP, because he will certainly lose the affection of most bumiputras without even the slightest assured support from the non bumiputras.

Afterall, the non-bumiputras in Malaysia have got so used to relying only on themselves and thanks to self-reliance, they need no clutches to stand or walk.

Anwar Ibrahim is a Visionary.

He knows, the very aid that is supposed to help can turn out to be that very bait that entraps.

Imagine for a moment, if your one year old child could only babble, crawl and need to be fed and cleaned, well, that is normal.

But this very child of yours, who is not an invalid still expects you to feed and clean him like a one year old child when he is already 37 years old, is that still cute especially when he still crawls and not walk? When is he going to grow up and be independent?

Affirmative Action, to be sustainable in the long run, needs justification and justification on helping the poor regardless of color, religion or creed.

Anwar Ibrahim knows what it is like to have dignity (maruah).

Even if today Anwar Ibrahim is a pauper, poor in money; he is rich in dignity.

Anwar Ibrahim, you have done your ancestors proud and I hope many of us will emulate you.

I salute you!

Blind Men Versus One Eye Man

2007-07-30T00:44:00.000-07:00

In the land of the blind, the one eye man is King!

This old but wise adage still rings true today because sight and insight to problems even in this day and age is still lacking as the masses are still trapped in their mindset, incapacitated by their own paradigm paralysis.

Today, most of us ought to be aware as well as be concerned about human caused global warming and climate change, yet only a few of us are taking positive and practical actions to walk our talk because we are not prepared to be inconvenienced.

We love our energy guzzling and waste creating lifestyle and while we pay great lip service to the cause of tackling climate change and global warming, we, if anything at all, do very little to match our words with deeds.

We are, generally, blind and being blind, we perceive the whole picture of the dire state of the environment only in parts; not the whole.

Just like as in the famous Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, every blind man perceive the unfamiliar animal according to their own "feelings", the one who felt the elephant's trunk insisted that the elephant is like a snake; the tail, a snake; the belly, a wall and the leg, a tree.

Even if we combined the collective intelligence of the blind men towards the attempted deciphering of an unfamiliar animal (problem), we will never get any wiser or further.

What is needed is a sighted person, even half a sighted person will do: with just one eye or a pair of partially sighted eyes, to see the whole picture.

Today's problems call for new solutions, not those of yesterdays but of visionary caliber.

The vision that the whole Cosmos is built upon the twin foundation of sustainability and renewal-ability, without which, the system will self implode and collapse

The Earth sustains and renews itself, with or without human beings and really, human beings are redundant to the Earth in so far as the long term viability of the Earth is concerned.

Imagine planet Earth devoid of homa sapiens, plants will continue to thrive, animals will continue to survive on the thriving plants and other animals that feed on plants.

Take away the plants and there will be no animals and humans.

We need just one, not, two eyes to see the dire state of the environment we are in, but the good news is that, we still have hope to turn the environment around, if we act very tough and act now.

Broga Incinerator is Off: Good News or Bad News?

2007-07-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

The Broga Incinerator project is now officially, "Burnt", thanks to unsustainable cost, that's the official reason from the Malaysian government.

While the people, especially those in the vicinity of the proposed project cheered and breathed a sigh of relief, ought others follow suit?

The problem of waste disposal is faced by every community and nation globally and the more "modernized" and "industrialized", the bigger and more complex the problem.

While incinerating waste is one of the many alternatives in waste disposal, it has it's very serious residual waste and gas emission problems.

It is a fact that burning common plastics like PVC releases toxic and carcinogenic substances like Dioxin and the concentrated residue at the end of the incineration process needs disposal too, and more often that not, these are concentrated toxic waste.

My take of the situation is that the Malaysian government finally woke up to the fact that they themselves may not be able to meet the strict environmental standards they have legislated, so better to abort now then face the inevitable embarrassment down the road.

However, if we look at the solid waste disposal problem in Malaysia, we cannot escape from the fact that continue the "business as usual" basis is going to bury us all in waste.

If we continue to generate and landfill waste at the rate we are doing now, sooner or later, we are going to ran out of land.

Looking across the Causeway, in land scarce Singapore, they are even running out of land to bury the dead, let alone rubbish!

Singapore had gone the incineration route for more than two decades already and had it not been so, she would have another hill, Bukit Sampah, besides Bukit Timah.

It is true that incineration always cost more, ton for ton of rubbish, but buried rubbish is not something that will go away within a generation or two; it will come back to haunt our future generations.

The only long term viable and sustainable way out seems to lie in the 4Rs: Review, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

If the net total of necessary waste can be reduced to its absolute minimum, whether it is incineration or burying, either one will be equally viable.

Waste sorted at source is the way to go.

Organic waste ought to be composted and returned to the land as food for other organism. Reducing, reusing and recycling will help but the best of all is for all of us to review our consumption habits: Do I really need to consume this, in this wasteful manner?

Eventually, when we waste not, we want not!

A Bridge Too Far?

2007-05-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

PM Ahmad Badawi believes that in the future, there will be many bridges built to link Malaysia and Singapore just as there are more than 2000 over bridges in New York and over 20 over the Han River in Seoul, Korea, the STAR (May12, 2007).

While we can only speculate the basis to the PM's belief (since beliefs need no factual foundation), I would beg to differ if bridges per se are the solutions to the actual problem of process bottle necks arising from he necessary and unnecessary CIQ (Customs, Immigration and Quarantine) processes and procedures, given the sovereignty and pride of both nations to symbolize it through their separate CIQ processes: Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore are TWO different countries, they used to be together as ONE, albeit for a brief moment in history in the 1960s.

One of the common basis on the need for another bridge is the perennial traffic congestion, but the question is what causes the congestion on the Causeway in the first place and what is it that a bridge can solve that a causeway could not?

Is there magic in a Bridge that a Causeway has not?

The so called "Second Link", a bridge built more than 15 years ago as the answer to the traffic congestion problem on the Causeway hardly even ever solve an iota of the problem on the Causeway; it only solve the problem on the Bridge because commuters found Bridge's toll too expensive and also too out of the way for most people on either side of the Straits.

The Second Link remains under utilized, even up till today, no surprises though. But what baffles me is that certain people see Bridges as the solution to traffic congestion: build a bridge and there will be no congestion on it; build a causeway and it will be a sure way to ensure congestion!

What logic!

Sigh! On the other hand, in Bolehland, even the absurd is plausible!

The Second Link costs more than 10 times more, is inaccessible unless you are prepared to drive.

The congestion on the Causeway is in juxtaposition to the Second Link Bridge because of economics and convenience, nothing magical in that a bridge will somewhat chase all the congestion away!

The other causes to the congestion is the necessary CIQ clearance on both sides of the Causeway, a problem inherent in linking two countries together, because each country wants to stamp their sovereignty through at least some form of rudimentary CIQ clearance.

Therefore, unlike New York or Seoul where the bridges are within the same domain and need no CIQ clearance, the bridges that are believed by the PM to be built in the future, can only be pipe dreams, unless of course, he is not saying that Singapore will in the future be part of Malaysia again.

It sometime baffles me as to what material or the lack of it that politicians are made up of.

They get elected to office not because they are people of substance and integrity, but because they know how to play the political game well and be popular rather than effective.

Where are the JFKs and Indira Ghandis of Malaysia?

Alas, I hope there is still hope for Malaysia, for if our leaders could not even see the clear black and white issues about a simple logistics problem over two domains but continue to hallucinate and dream in fancy rainbow vividness, will Malaysia ever be able to be lead out of its current murkiness?

God, have mercy on the people of Malaysia!

Pipeline PipeDream?

2007-05-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

I have just heard on Channel News Asia (07May2007) that the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Ahmad Badawi has just announced that Malaysia will be building a couple of billion Ringgit worth pipeline to channel crude oil carried on ships from the Middle East at a point on the western side of northern Peninsular Malaysia to another point on the north eastern side to be processed into refined petroleum for export to the Far East (China, Japan, Indo-China, Taiwan etc).

News had it that this is in response to the increasing unease about security in the Straits of Malacca, ranging from piracy, terrorism and treats to the environment in the event of an accidental of man made oil spillage.

If and when the project materialises, the implications are major for member ASEAN countries bordering the Straits of Malacca, chiefly Singapore, who in one way of another benefit from ships transiting at en route to the Far East.

We may recall that way back in the late 1800's, there was already a plan proposed by one English gentleman R.W. Duff to build a canal ala the Suez and Panama to cut shipping time by omitting the Straits of Malacca: the Isthmus of Kra Canal.

Three years back, while searching on the Internet for information about the Isthmus of Kra, I was pleasantly surprised that the idea of a canal is not new, it even predates that of Duff's.

It was in fact promulgated by a King of Siam (King Narai the Great, 1677) long before King Mongkut. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kra_Isthmus)

The Kra Canal never got off the ground because the British were dead against it, for it will spell the death of Singapore, their revenue center at the tip of Asia where all sea traffic sailing West to East and vice-versa has to pass through it and pay toll.

The death of the Kra Canal was sealed when the British got the Siamese to sign a treaty in 1897, agreeing never to build a canal that could threathen the survival of Singapore.

Once in a while, the idea of a Kra Canal will pop up but somehow, the Thais show no passion about it though it was first mooted by a Thai King long ago.

The Isthmus of Kra is actually a very narrow strip of land, no more than 50km at its widest and given the technology we have today, building a canal to handle even the biggest of the super tankers will take no more than 1 year.

Of course cutting the Kra is like cutting the umbilical cord that connects Bangkok to the restive south, not a good idea when Bangkok is at wits ends on how to win back the breaking away southern territories.

But on the other hand, making a cut is also tantamount to containment, sending a message that Bangkok is containing the south so that it can be better controlled.

Rationally, the Kra Canal is better idea, economically, logistically, strategically etc as not only oil tankers can use it, but all kinds of sea going vessels.

With an area less than 50km long, it is also easier to secure.

It will be interesting what will conspire these coming weeks.

Will Singapore gang up with Thailand to build the Kra Canal with US blessings, since if you are going to lose business, you may as well mitigate potential losses by sharing future profits?

From the point of conservation, sustainable and renewable development, the Kra Canal is long overdue. Everyday, needless travel have to be done by thousands of ships sailing from the West to the East or to the South by passing through the narrow and pirate infested Straits of Malacca and if traffic continues to increase, it is a matter of when, not if a major oil spill will occur, impacting on the environment and life here in at least three countries: Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Well, for all we know, the PipeLine Project could well be just a PipeDream Project but we can be certain that Singapore will not be sitting pretty...something is in the pipeline...and will be happening soon.

Jeffrey Sachs, Al Gore, Global Warming, Climate Change & Sustainable Development

2007-04-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

I have been following Prof. Jeffrey Sachs' 2007 Reith Lectures on the BBC Radio and had just watched two life changing movies: Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and another Sundance's movie "Who Killed the Electric Car".

Really, at the way we are "developing" by raping the Earth reminds me of a scene in the Lord of the Rings' movie where Saruman's war campaign spike up the production of weapons that sucks up vast amounts of energy from felled timber.

The scene is one of utter environmental devastation: destruction of the eco-balance.

Are we already in or at the brink of the no return road of unsustainable development?

I honestly think so.

Look at the pressure on fresh water.

Next it will be food, shelter, services and even the very air we need for survival.

The law of Nature is Equilibrium, Nature will sustain to the point of sustainable balance.

In other words, when we tip the balance, death and destruction will naturally occur until a new balance is attained.

If we take a moment to think, Earth is a self contained sustainable and renewable entity floating in sterile Space.

The eco-system of the Earth is self sustainable and renewable: the hydrological cycle, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle or death to sustain life of one's organism waste as another organism's food etc and the original source of energy powered by the Sun.

If, say at an instance all human life on Earth is wiped out, will other life forms continue to prevail on Earth. The answer is a resounding "YES".

But not the other way round.

The Earth needs no Homo Sapiens to keep it viable and sustainable, but we need the Earth to live.

Strange that even when we know there is no other Earth near us that we can shift to in case life on planet Earth becomes unsustainable and yet we keep on destroying it for short term economic gains.

Unless we are of the persuasion that we need to destroy Earth to hasten the advent of Heaven, we ought to preserve the only heaven that we know of that exists on planet Earth.

The Kingdom of Heaven will come in God's perfect timing, it is the sole prerogative of God, as for us mortals, we are to be His good and faithful stewards in managing Earth well, which is our duty and responsibility.

National Disgrace

2007-04-28T00:39:00.000-07:00

I have the utmost respect for Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye personally and for his leadership to the team of people running the Malaysian National Service (NS), but what he wrote and was published in the STAR today (Sunday, 28Jan07) perturbs me to the core!

What is the matter really with the whole NS concept, planning, implementation and review?

After a good many years of running the program, anyone would have expected the basic teething problems to have been tackled, yet we see basic failures still persisting, from transport arrangements to food and accommodation blunders.

Also, the recruitment of girls for the NS. What's the basis and necessity? It is challenging enough to keep an eye on boys under group behavior in training, combined this with girls in group behavior, and a pair of eyes is not even sufficient!

The last straw that broke my back and compelled me to write is the Chairman of the National Service Training Council's clever reliance on the Health Ministry's "pointing" that, I quote, "...a majority of our youths are actually healthy (more than 95%)" and that it is why it is not viable to conduct medical examinations on all potential trainees.

How unimaginative, uncreative and lacking in "thinking out of the box initiative" with a tinge of irresponsibility that statement and attitude is, if you like.

Safety, security and the avoidance of sickness, injury or death to any and all participants and trainers ought to be paramount priority because human life is priceless!

Please do not insinuate the caring and compassionate intrinsic attributes of us Malaysians!

Medical examination for all potential NS candidates not only protects the individual participants, it also benefits all, provided the relevant parameters are correctly selected and tested. The last thing any NS participant wants is to catch a high contagious and communicable disease (like tuberculosis, HIV, hepatitis etc) from living and training in very close proximity and quarters where injuries with open wounds makes it viable for diseases to be passed on from one to the other.

For potential participants who already know they are not healthy, this is not a problem, they would have applied for an exemption with supporting medical certificates, the hidden dangers are for those who are not aware that they are not medically fit for NS training and have not the resources to undergo voluntary medical screening.

If we do not have the resources (which all of us know is untrue, we are not a poor country), then we should not even bother to have a half baked NS programs.

There are so many clinics well distributed all over the nation offering medical screenings and I am sure every General Practitioner will be more than happy to be of service for a reasonable fee. I am also confident that if called upon, the medical profession will be more than willing to contribute their part of the national service. I am confident that all doctors are doctors because they first felt a call to serve. With a little "thinking out of the box", I am sure esteemed organizations like the NS Council would have thought of offering opportunities to doctors to contribute their services to the National Service Program. MMA and individual doctors, please feel free to comment.

The point is simple, if something is worth doing, it is worth doing right, can you disagree on this, Mr. Chairman and members of his Board of Council?

Bridge Over Troubled Water?

2007-04-28T00:31:00.000-07:00

In the Malaysian STAR newspapers of 25Apr2007, the MP for Johor Bahru was reported to have commented that it is a matter of time Singapore would acquiesce to a bridge to replace the Causeway, inter-alia when Singapore has amortized the capital investment in their CIQ infrastructure.

With due respect to one of the wiser and more learned MPs of Malaysia, and speaking from the position of a common citizen who is born and bred in Johor Bahru and also a frequent user of the Causeway, Datuk Shahrir, has missed the point.

The political vision, mission and culture in Singapore vis-a-vis Malaysia is almost in opposition.

Lest we forget, the latest Singapore CIQ was designed and built on the premise of an earlier agreement with Malaysia that the KTM will terminate at Woodlands, Singapore.

Not a single notion was even hinted at having a common Bridge to replace the Causeway.

When Singapore does something, she has to justify her actions with cost and benefit based on purpose, the guidance has always been on the basis of purpose, justification, value, equity, accountability and responsibility.

So what is the whole real purpose of replacing the Causeway?

What is the single most important reason for still having the Causeway when there is already the Second Link Bridge somewhere beyond the yonder from Johor Bahru city itself?

The Causeway is the life-link for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in Johor Bahru and Malaysia.

Hundreds of thousands of people commute daily on the Causeway, to work, to study, to seek medical treatment, to visit friends and relatives, to shop, to dine, to catch an international flight because our so called international airport in Senai is only international in name! and etc.

To me, I see the whole issue in a very simple paradigm: the purpose of the link be it a bridge or a causeway or even a ferry crossing is communication, transport and logistics.

Therefore, the justification for any changes to the status quo ought to be if the replacement adds value.

What is it in a Bridge (straight or crooked) that can achieve but a Causeway cannot?

Ought not the priority be in the fast and cost effective mass rapid transit of people, goods and services across the Link?

A rethink is needed here.

We need no new bridge, just the will to serve the rakyat better.

Start with a common centralized CIQ processing (common in many European borders), one in JB and one in Singapore where customs, immigration and customs clearance are commonly cleared at a single location.

Another is a Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system to transport people traffic from JB to Singapore and vice-versa.

All the infrastructure in Singapore is ready to extend its time tested MRT system to Johor Bahru, but as usual, the business lobby in Malaysia will oppose this to protect their own pockets at the expense of the rakyat.

I can clearly see that if the MRT is extended to Johor Bahru, many motorists would give up their motorbikes and cars and take public transport and coupled with the efficient CIQ processing system, the issue of the Bridge to replace the Causeway would be a thing of the pass.

There will be win-win-win for all, the rakyat wins, governments win and the environment wins in terms of the better energy efficiency and less pollution.

Would wisdom prevail? Not, I guess, unless and until Malaysians are ready to change our mindsets and shift our paradigms.

Until then, Singapore will surge forward while we remain stagnated in our own parochial darkness.

Helping Hands Without Destroying

2007-03-05T23:44:00.000-08:00

One of the attributes of a civilized and cultured person is: Compassion.

Compassion that that is beyond mere words, empirically verifiable by practical and effective actions, one of which is in rendering help to others, a Helping Hand or Two.

Helping Hands not only benefit the recipients, it also blesses the giver, as the saying goes: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”.

The irony of it all is there seems to be a lack of “Blessed Givers” and more wanting Receivers.

Helping others is a universal cross cultural value and there is no culture anywhere in the world, then, now or even in he future, which condemns or denounces the giving of aid to the less fortunate, although there are many cultures that do not encourage and would in fact prohibit helping one's rivals or enemies.

True Helping Hands helps irrespective of creed, class, color, species, race, religion or even relationship or the lack of it.

The litmus test is helping others in need even when the other party is your enemy or an animal, all because True Helping Hands are intrinsically altruist in object and motivation.

It may surprise us now, but as late as the mid Sixteenth Century CE, people groups like the Red Indians of the Americas and Blacks of Africa were classified as “barbarians” fit only for “natural slavery” as they are no better than animals and therefore justified to be kept as slaves and treated like farmed animals.

We may look back and realize quite intuitively that this was an erroneous notion, but alas, humanity may not have progresses any further from the identical mindset that hatch such inhumane paradigm.

It therefore should not surprise us why many people in the Twenty First Century CE still treat animals like we treat other people groups then, who may appear to differ from us, as animals.

True Helping Hands helps because help is needed at that exact point of time and space where the Helping Hands happen to be the neighbor where help is needed and could be rendered without any peril to the life and limb of the Helping Hands, or even at the risk of it, because Helping Hands care enough to support compassion with action.

The Teacher of Love and Compassion said some two millennium ago, “Love thy enemy as thyself”, always lending a helping hand to heal, to set free and to empower individuals to achieve their up most best, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, while hanging and dying being crucified on the Cross for crimes he did not commit, not only did not utter an unkind word to his enemies and accusers, but asked God to forgive them, because they were ignorant.

On the other hand, Helping Hands can also become unintentional “Destroying Hands”, when dependency became the end result of good intentioned aid. This is evidenced in many aid recipient countries in Africa where the people who were initially too weak to fend for themselves are now made too strong and lazy to look after themselves.

As the whole purpose of extending a pair of Helping Hands is “empowerment” and not mere “aid” per se, extending aid ought to be what the Chinese Sage, Confucius advocated more than 2000 years ago: “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, Teach him to fish and he eats a lifetime”.

Helping Hands can also come full circle, we help wherever we can, for who knows we may have unknowingly helped angels in the process. But whatever it is, when we have the opportunity to be Helping Hands to our neighbours, we are all blessed, the giver, the receiver and also the Creator of both.

Frugality for Sustainability

2007-02-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

The Confucius ideal of frugality probably stems from the entrenched Chinese Cultural Value of conserving resources as a contingent against possible future natural calamity like floods, earthquakes, famines etc that constantly plaque China of the old and the now.

The idea of not lavishing one's wealth but saving for the future, makes no coincidence the nations in Asia with a majority ethnic Chinese population the nations with the biggest propensity to save and therefore to invest: Singapore, Taiwan and even China itself.

In a setting that is beset by the uncertain vagaries of Nature, the inhabitants of that peculiar habitat have disciplined themselves to make do with little and be contented to postpone present consumption and gratification for the sake of the future and their future generations.

Nothing is wasted and nothing is put to waste.

Imagine a people who is able to feed itself and with very little arable land vis-a-vis the huge population at hand and even before the advent of the so called modern agricultural methods, systems and processes: chemical fertilizers and mechanization.

The secret? No secret, only the philosophy of Harmony and the conscious effort in maintaining a harmonious balance (homeostasis) between Man and Nature, between using the land and returning to the land, what we have taken from her, between taking and also giving.

In the whole philosophy of the Way (Tao) of Harmony, the waste of one organism becomes the food of another and the cycling of Nature to and fro is maintained within the Cycle of Life, Death, Renewability for Sustainability.

For example, the return of human waste to the vegetables field is a long held successful farming practise and this has successfully allowed China to feed her millions upon millions of people and be in self sufficient in food production for thousands of years and without the use of chemical fertilizers.

Look what we have put ourselves into in the name of "modern farming methods".

We lock up our own excreta in expensive sewage systems and uses huge amounts of good potable water to maintain it, only to mine more minerals to make fertilizers and burn more green house gases fuel to create energy to manufacture them, at the expense of the environment so that we can continue to pollute the Earth with our necessary sustenance activities. A loss-loss-loss situation that we have trapped ourselves in: Loss for the people, loss for the environment and loss of scarce resources.

The only winners in this so called "modern agricultural movement" are the people involved in the mining, manufacturing and distribution of chemical fertilizers.

Honestly, if there were to be sustainability, there must be renewability and the cutting down of consumption to a basic frugal level that we use up Earth's resources only up to the very basic minimum so that the Earth can recycle itself, before we tip the balance to the point of no return.

Being frugal in the context of sustainability, even when there is renewability is a wise habit of choice because really, we don't own the Earth, past, present and future generations are co-stewards of the Great Planet Earth and if we are wanton enough to destroy the Earth to satisfy our own selfish present gratifications with no regard whatsoever for other people or now or the future, we ought not the right to live here on Planet Earth.

The only way to a sustainable future to me is the Way of Frugality, the cutting down of consumption to the barest minimal and the conservation of resources through and deliberate sustainable and renewabilty lifestyle choices and let it start today, even, not tomorrow, next week or next year. For procrastination is indeed the thief of time.

Third Wave Warning for Johor and Reflections on the Environment

2007-01-25T06:55:00.000-08:00

Thursday 25January2007, The STAR Headlines: 'Third wave' warning for Johor:

What a cruel joke, I thought to myself, but on the other hand this is plausible and therefore only reasonable and proper for the Meteorological Services Department to warn us of impending disasters when the root cause of the problem remains untackled.

I am not pertaining to the impact of climate change, nor of distractive cloud seeding but what we have neglected to our own peril: drainage maintenance.

Through years of neglect and abuse of the environment from human activities like logging, construction, manufacturing, agriculture etc that exposed the top soil to erosion that silted the rivers, we have literally turn the lower lying areas (where rivers in their natural life cycle flows slower) into premature flood plains.

Really, the solution is simple, either we spend lots of money and other resources in tackling the root problem by preventing and getting rid of the silt through dredging etc or alternatively, we just adapt and hope to survive.

So long as the rivers and drains remained silted and clogged, floods recur and something we just have to live with, unless we are prepared to pay more taxes or have less of other services, so as to pay for the clean up of the rivers because governments all over the world face the common identical problem: balancing the budget of expenditure with income through taxation and money creation.

With hind sight, we may realize how wise our forefathers who live by the riverine areas were.

Where flash floods are not uncommon at the riverine areas that provided them with the needed transport network, they simply adapt and thrive.

They are prepared and ready anytime for flash floods: building houses on high stilts and a boat they used for daily transport, ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice.

They adapted well and the testimony to that is the survival of their descendants to this day.

As Man builds, Man destroys as well and unless we are prepared to amend our ways to show some due respect to the conservation and protection of the environment, the environment will soon have none of us.

Think for a moment, we need the environment more than the environment needs us.

Should we all perish from the planet Earth in one instance and provided the Sun still shines, life of other form will continue to flourish and thrive: the plants will continue to live and provide sustenance to the other flora and fauna that depended on them.

Let's stop treating the Earth like dirt and whilst it may be too late to reverse some of the effects of human caused climatic change, we still have the opportunities to do something constructive for the environment, by first doing no harm.

Also, we can adapt to survive; perhaps stilted buildings will soon be a common sight in places like flood prone Kota Tinggi?

Why not? Buildings on stilts have character and reflect the tenacity and the humble wisdom of the human spirit to survive through adaptation.

The Key to Survival: Adapting, Flowing Along

2007-01-24T20:28:00.000-08:00

In December 2006 and January 2007, many parts of Johor, the southern most state of Malaysia received a record of more than 100mm of rainfall over a period of 3days continuous rain.

Many towns and even the capital city of Johor Bahru, hitherto unaccustomed to such floods caught many a unprepared crowd, not once, but twice in an interval of less than 3 weeks.

Many theories were put forward by experts, laypersons and politicians trying to explain and even exonerate responsibilities and many found the perfect scapegoat: "Mother Nature" and "Acts of God". Poor Mother and Poor God, what blaspheme and what scandalous convenience!

Whilst it is true that the rain that fell was exceptionally high in deluge, not all areas where the deluge of rain fell was inundated and this begs the question why?

The cause of floods is simple.

When the desired level of water in a targeted area is above the desired threshold, the relevant place is considered undesirable flooded.

Flooding therefore occurs when the net inflow is more than the outflow of water in a given area.

It is now almost conclusive that the recent flooding whilst primarily caused by a lethal combination of heavy rainfall and high tides, badly maintained drainage system is also to be blamed.

Many of the major rivers: Kota Tinggi, Segamat, Kluang and Muar where heavily silted through years of neglect and it was a disaster waiting to happen.

There is now a warning out there to expect a possible "Third Wave" of flooding and the unease could be felt everywhere and every time when rain is a little heavy and longer than usual

But heavier and longer rainfall as a result of green house effect climate change will be it and not the exception from now onwards.

What then are the options available for us to ensure that flooding does not adversely affect us?

From cloud seeding to adopting sustainable development strategies and dredging the rivers to get rid of the silt, none is more cost effective and viable than to flow with Nature: ADAPTIVE SURVIVAL.

It is as is now that these places that flood are now becoming "flood plains" and this be so, adapt to the changes by adopting appropriate flood plain systems and processes.

The Stilted Malay House, once a feature for houses located at or near rivers to accommodate the seasonal floods need to be revived as our adaptive response to the change in the behaviour of the climate brought about by our wanton heartless treatment of the environment through our selfish gratification consumption behavior.

If we fail to adapt, by Darwin's Law, we will be overwhelmed by outside forces and perish to the pages of history as species that failed.

At the end of the day, it is the Survival of the Fittest, like it or not and the fittest survives primarily by their witty adaptation.

Adapt and Flow Along until something better comes along.

Washing Ones Dirty Sins in the Publicly Dirtier Holy Rivers

2007-01-20T09:08:00.000-08:00

Karl Marx said, "Religion is the Opium of the People".

If one were to ponder wide and deep into the meaning of this statement against the most atrocious, illogical and even lunatical deeds done in the name of religion, it is not difficult to see why religion is indeed a drug that sedates, hallucinates and causes mankind to stray into unreality and trapped in addiction.

Human sacrifice, superstition, suicide bombing to attain a piece of paradise in the sky, spending one's lifetime savings on a single pilgrimage, penance, bathing is dirty holy rivers to rid one's multi past life sins, feng shui, bazi etc are the outrageous things people will do in the name of religion.

Take for example the forgiveness of past life(s) and present life sins by dipping in polluted so called holy rivers, to what logic is this?

Millions went ga-ga to dip into the Ganges and Ramuna in the belief that there past and present sins will somehow be "washed" away by the holy waters because at his special auspicious moments when the cosmos align once in half a decade or so, the "nectar" of the gods poured into the waters of these rivers will perform these sin erasing miracles.

Hey, wait a minute, what about the many other millions Hindus in India and elsewhere who are laden with sins but have not the means to travel to this place? Will they die only to be recycled back to an even lower caste through the "law" of karma tic reincarnation?

A God or gods who stipulate that only by going to a certain place to perform a certain ritual before his or her sins are forgiven, to me, deserve not the reverence nor respect of man.

The Jews worship in Jerusalem, yet the Samaritans worship in the mountains, but Jesus Christ said more than two thousand years ago that it will come a time, when time and place is of no relevance when the worship of God is concerned. For, it will come a time when we shall worship God in spirit and in truth, because God after all is Spirit.

If God is Spirit, He is not confined to time and space and further, the Kingdom of God is within man and no where else.

If we cannot revere God in our daily living in our home town, but found it necessary to burn away good money in making a long journey to some place to wash away our sins, this seems ostensibly silly to me.

If we could just be more conscious and committed to walk our talk in our daily life, religion would no longer be addictive opiate but medicine to heal a world burdened with sin and death.

Let's take this first step of faith in this long journey of life of walking our talking, for indeed there ought to be less talk and more walk for walking is visible even from afar, whereas talking is audible only within a small radius.

Of Physics and Metaphysics

2007-01-19T01:38:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been wondering about the claims of many a Feng Sui, BaZi and Tao Masters that their practise is "scientific" and "logical" as opposed to quackery.

Whilst I can accept that not everything factual can be experienced and verified by our five senses, it also does not make sense that we can claim something to be scientific just because we could chart out its paradigm.

Take for example gravity, magnetism and electricity. Before these we discovered, its proponents were ridiculed. Yet till today, while we accept gravity exist although we cannot touch, taste, see, feel or smell it, the same cannot be claimed for something like Feng Sui. Gravity may not be verifiable by our senses, but it can be scientifically proven to exist by repeatable experiments that yield predictable and consistent results.

The same cannot be said about Feng Sui and the likes.

Feng Sui is not scientific because its outcome is never consistent nor predictable.

The Feng Sui Master will always take the easy escape route when his recommendations fail to yield result: "Lack of Faith".

If Science relies on faith, that it is no science for Faith is not required in a sure thing as Fact.

If the outcome of an event depends on faith, "If you believe it will come true, if you don't it will not" kind of premise, you can safely chuck it out as unscientific.

When was the last time your physician told you to have faith in him and/or the medicine he is prescribing you as the prerequisite to your healing? This only comes from a "witch doctor" not a qualified physician who knows that diseases is primarily caused by germs; not charms.

I make no apology, let the charlatans have their own clientele, but please do not insult the intelligence of people who understands what Science and being scientific is.

A Science that does not have predictable Cause and Effect Results is no Science and people who practise something that had to depend on faith to achieve the desired result and not on the law of Cause and Effect alone, please at least be honest and admit that theirs is no Science.

There is no shame to be honest, even when people wants to follow you in spite of knowing that you are a fraud and what you have to offer is a lie.

If people wish to feed their superstition appetite, so be it, you don't have to dishonestly mislead them, be honest about your dishonesty, this is the least you can be.

Honest dishonest Chinese Meta-Physics Masters, any takers?

Solar Thermal Primer

2007-01-18T09:02:00.000-08:00

Depending on where you are, Planet Earth's surface generally receives from 1 to 4.5kWh per m2 of Solar energy per day.

This amount of energy is sufficient to give you sunburn with sufficient exposure time, but not enough to cook.

Since critical temperature is required for cooking, if we can concentrate the amount of solar energy to a small point, the concentrated solar thermal energy could be raised to a temperature that is sufficient to do meaningful cooking. Imagine using a magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight to a point strong enough to burn a hole on a sheet of paper.

Another way of converting sunlight into cooking fuel is through trapping and accumulation like that of a glass house. Trapped solar thermal heat if accumulated and prevent from being lost to the ambient can raise to a critical temperature that is sufficient for cooking.

The key to mining free energy from the Sun as fuel is therefore in concentrating sunlight to reach a critical cooking temperature point of at least 65degrees Celsius through the process of concentration and/or accumulation.

Parabolic and Fresnel type cookers concentrate sunlight to a smaller point to reach temperatures that cook and Box Cookers and Solar Kettles using solar vacuum tubes technology accumulate trapped solar heat and prevent its lost to the ambient by insulation. Panel Cookers are hybrid Solar Cookers employing a combination of concentration and accumulation.

Thinking Outside the Box

2007-01-17T22:37:00.001-08:00

A buzz phrase, a jargon, widely mentioned but unfortunately least understood fully.

Thinking outside the box presupposes the ability to think in the first place.

If one is not even capable of thinking, than really thinking within the box is not very possible, let alone outside.

Why is thinking so difficult, one may think.

Thinking is a learned ability as much as it an innate one.

Thinking and language is also intricately linked since we all must reason in our mind or even aloud verbalised or written in script through a reasoning media: a language.

However, empirically, whilst language and thinking are intricately linked, it does not necessarily mean that people with language disabilities is in any way concomitantly disabled in thinking abilities.

Deaf, mute, blind and illiterate people who had no acquired language abilities are known to be able to think reasonably and creatively.

The Swiss behaviorist Piaget hypothesised that thinking is an innate ability because babies even before acquiring the ability to verbalise speech are able to reason and solve problems. It is as if we were all born with an innate language free reasoning ability before we take up a learned language to function as the reasoning language media.

It is also apparent that since language influences reasoning, and since all languages are culture bias, the language a person uses to reason do limit or box a person's reasoning ability.

For a ideas to flow, there must not be any limits but total freedom.

Anyone who aspires to greatness must be given the total freedom to fly like an Eagle and not be boxed and bound on the ground like a Turkey.

Sometimes we box ourselves by our fear and sometimes by our ignorance.

We could be living in a totally free country and yet our thinking could be boxed in by our culture and religion, we fear to think beyond what we think our religion allows.

To me, a religion or culture that imposes on how we ought to think is despotic.

God is not a despot because he made us no robots. On the contrary, he made us humans with a free will to choose and integral to free choice is free will and to free will the freedom to think.

When we are fearful even to think the seemingly forbidden things, we deny the greatness of the Almighty in making us humans with a free will.

Similarly, let no man or angels, fallen or otherwise dissuade us from the basic right God has given us and most enlightened governments that followed in tandem to support: the Freedom to Think.

Thinking Outside the Box presupposes the ability to think and to think freely without any inhibitions or limits as a 'Box' symbolises: constraints.

It is easy for leaders, political or otherwise to urge the people to think outside the box, the irony is who created the box when none is supposed to be there in the first place and do they impose on others what they themselves are incapable of doing.

Let it not be like a father crab commanding its children to walk straight, let him the leader learn or even undergo therapy to walk straight first!

Asking his people to think outside the box when they are still imprisoned in the box is one big joke leaders can command their people to be.

Do I hear a familiar voice from the distant past in the land of the despotic Pharaoh?

Just as Moses told Pharaoh, the message from the Great I AM reverberated through the ages:

Let My People Go and Let My People Grow!

The Way of the Cycle

2007-01-16T04:58:00.000-08:00

The Way of the Cosmos is the Way of the Cycle, with built-in Renew-ability and Sustainability, where there is no place for waste, as one organism's waste is another organism's food, where death sustains life and where nothing is new; only fresh.

Carbon Cycle, Nitrogen Cycle, Hydrological Cycle and yet we humans are notorious for breaking and disrupting Cycles and reaping the dire effects from a broken cycle of renew-ability and sustainability.

We used to waste not and therefore want not.

We put back to the ground, what we took from it.

We eat the produce of the land and gave back our excreted waste to the land as food for the flora and fauna as they fed on the nitrogen and carbon that produce the food we need, thus completing the Cycle.

But see what we do now.

We deposit our waste in a septic tank and buy expensive mined minerals to fertilize our land to produce food.

Not only did we break the Cycle of Sustainability and Renew-ability; we destroy as we create: mining lands to extract minerals, destroying more when we ought just to return our waste to the land.

Look at the glass of water you will be drinking today.

Where did it come from? From the tap linked to some reservoir which takes its source from a river or some other body of water.

There is no new water, every drop is recycled, reused from the Jurassic Age.

Your drink is used and passed out as urine and in due course, it will return as drinking water again as it goes through the Hydrological Cycle Process where the Sun heating the sea and the land caused water evaporation and return the precipitation.

Yet again, we break the Cycle, by polluting the water through our greed and dimming the Earth through our excessive burning of fossil fuel to fuel our economic pursuit.

We have only one Earth and yet we are killing ourselves by breaking all the Cycles that sustain us.

When will we realise the value of flowing with the Cycle of the Cosmos by keeping the Way of the Cycle.

What fools we are, knowing the cost of breaking the Cycles, yet ignoring the value of preserving them.

Flowing with the Cycle

Root of All Evil: the love of money

Economics: The Dismal Science

Durians

People are like Durians, you either love them or lothe them, Coz, they can be hell outside, but heaven inside, Or, hell outside and worst still, crap inside! Alex Kee, 29Jan2010, Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Smelly Quote

"When you hate someone, even his shadow stinks; if you love, even his fart smells good."

Alex Kee, 29Jan2010

Green Money

Contemplations On the Mandatory Death Sentence

The Moral Capitalist: Oxymoron?

Repent, Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

A Response to Pure Capitalism

This is my response to:http://www.myfreedompost.com/2009/11/video-of-jon-voights-speech-in.html

What are the Possible Causes of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis?

Which is Worse, "There is Only 1 Choice" or "You have No Choice"?

Economic Cycles or Deception Cycles, Really ?

A New World Order Starts With A New World Currency?

Two Deaths Won't One Life Resurrect

BNM's Zeti, "Zeti: Economy strong enough to take downturn"

Proverbial Boiled Frogs

Dr. Wee KS & Chinese Education

No Justice Without Equality

Creation or Evolution?

A Wonderful Speech is It?

Sustainability = Living Within the Renewable Cycle

Mangkali or Punjabi: Misnomer or Malice Meant?

Fishing in Troubled Waters

Sin & the Sinner

Affirmative Action, Sustainable?

Blind Men Versus One Eye Man

Broga Incinerator is Off: Good News or Bad News?

A Bridge Too Far?

Pipeline PipeDream?

Jeffrey Sachs, Al Gore, Global Warming, Climate Change & Sustainable Development

National Disgrace

Bridge Over Troubled Water?

Helping Hands Without Destroying

Frugality for Sustainability

Third Wave Warning for Johor and Reflections on the Environment

The Key to Survival: Adapting, Flowing Along

Washing Ones Dirty Sins in the Publicly Dirtier Holy Rivers

Of Physics and Metaphysics

Solar Thermal Primer

Thinking Outside the Box

The Way of the Cycle

This is my response to:
http://www.myfreedompost.com/2009/11/video-of-jon-voights-speech-in.html