Saturday, July 21, 2012

Juan Enriquez on Homo evolutis ~ can we trust the evolutionary process?



Plenty of food for thought in this inspired TED talk by Juan Enriquez, chairman and CEO of Biotechonomy. Humanity has no choice but to attain spiritual maturity pretty damn quickly - or the biotech at our disposal could turn us into an entirely hideous and utterly destructive species.

[Brought to my attention by Christy Tice]

In loving memory of the laminated sign on the Bamboo Palace loo...


INSTRUCTIONS
ON THE USE OF THE
MALAYSIA BOLEH
OR ZEN TOILET


There is a special technique for
getting optimum performance
from this 100% plastic, BN-approved cistern:

GENTLENESS & FOCUSED AWARENESS!

Try a firm, confident, resolute,
conscious but very gentle push…
then quickly release the lever
and wait till the water stops
flowing into the bowl.
An indecisive lever action
will keep the water running into
the bowl incessantly.

(Our water bill once totalled RM111
before the problem was identified)

TURN OFF THE SUPPLY TAP
AT THE METER BESIDE THE MAIN HOUSE 
IF WATER DOESN’T STOP FLOWING.

TURN ON AGAIN AFTER 10 MINUTES.

(AND NEVER AGAIN VOTE BN!)


Friday, July 20, 2012

How the Moon Tricked the Sun and Won the Night ~ A Temuan Tale Retold


THE SUN AND THE MOON were colleagues and rivals in heaven. The Sun was excitable, showy and hotheaded while the Moon was cool and calm and fairly compassionate. They both had lots of children who cluttered the sky with a great clamor.
     
The Moon noticed that the Sun’s offspring were fiery and hotheaded like their father. They caused the Earth to be so hot and troubled that no crops would grow, and Manusia (humanity) was in serious danger of starvation. The Moon went into meditation and devised an ingenious plan: She hid all her children on her dark side and began to bulge visibly. The Sun came along and was amazed.
    
 “Hey, where’s your brood?” the Sun asked. “And how come you’re all alone?”
   
The Moon burped and answered with a broad grin: “I ate them and they were absolutely delicious!”
     
The Sun, not to be outdone, immediately followed suit and devoured his children, every last one of them, until he too shone alone in the sky. Whereupon the Moon laughed and brought her little ones out from hiding and sent them out to play all over the night sky, where they turned into Stars. 

The Sun was furious but it was too late. He was all alone now and incapable of burning up the Earth with his hot temper.

And every Night, the Earth would cool down enough for crops to grow and Manusia flourished from then on, thanks to the Moon’s cleverness and kindness.

[From Tanah Tujuh ~ Close Encounters with the Temuan Mythos, Silverfishbooks 2007]


Thursday, July 19, 2012

DINOSAUR DYNASTIES & THE DINOSAUR TECHNOLOGIES THEY FOIST ON US (3rd time I'm posting this, that's how impenetrable their reptilian hides & skulls are!)

I read this letter in Malaysiakini from "Malaysian with Children" with profound disgust and outrage at the way Barisan Nasional is leading the nation straight to hell with their myopic, greed-driven, environmentally and morally ruinous schemes...


MALAYSIA GOING NUCLEAR FRAUGHT WITH DANGER
Malaysian with Children
Aug 24, 2009 3:31pm

The sun has been the main energy source for all life on the planet for billions of years. In Malaysia, we are blessed with a bounty of sunlight.

Yet, our Malaysian government is pushing for nuclear energy as though it is the best and only option for Malaysia's future energy needs.

The government seems to be brushing aside the dangers relating to nuclear power plants, as if they  were issues that didn't exist or could easily be remedied in the near future.


Developed countries are having serious difficulties with their own nuclear programmes. In the US, there are problems disposing of nuclear reactor waste.

In Finland, construction of nuclear power plants have been delayed and gone way over cost due to shoddy work on the concrete foundations.

What more of the situation in Malaysia, where we tend to have even less oversight in commercial dealings? Where is the safety or economic sense in all that?

From what I have seen, there is no detailed information available to the public on Malaysia's nuclear plans. Where will the reactor be located - maybe in Ipoh, or maybe Putrajaya?

What type of reactor will it be? Who will we buy the uranium to run the reactor from? How much will it all cost and who is paying for it?

If those weren't enough questions, what about the waste generated from our nuclear power plant - where and how Malaysia will be dealing with its own nuclear reactor waste - waste that remains highly radioactive for thousands of years?

Will we dump it in deep geological recesses off our coasts? Will we bury it in the jungles of Sarawak, Sabah or Pahang? Will we be reprocessing it in factories in Miri or in Kota Baru?

The world got into the mess of climate change and global warming because we went the quick, easy and convenient way.

We did not look at the long-term consequences of burning fossil fuels, perhaps because in the beginning, we didn't really know the consequences.

Our oceans and rivers are now choking on plastic pollution, because we needed cheap and lightweight material for packaging.

But we do know, right now, that nuclear energy will produce highly radioactive waste, even if it is in small amounts, every day a nuclear plant is open.

We do know, right now, that this highly radioactive waste must be disposed of somewhere on our finite planet. We do know, right now, that we have no technology to make this waste safe.


And as more countries build nuclear power plants, more of this waste is dumped into our Earth, the planet that sustains our lives.

It is unforgivable that we, as governments and responsible adults, knowingly create such dangerous waste without a concern for tomorrow.

We are already leaving our children with our legacy of global warming, and choking pollution.

And now we wish to leave this massive mess of nuclear waste and closed reactor sites to our grandchildren, leaving them with the burden of trying to figure out how to solve the problem that we ourselves have no idea how to solve.

I know I'm afraid, very afraid.


Here's an eminently sensible letter in response...

SOLAR ENERGY A BETTER ALTERNATIVE

Hai Hiung
Aug 26, 2009 4:03pm

I'm writing in regards to the following letter: "Malaysia going nuclear fraught with danger." I agree with the author, Malaysian with Children.

For reasons unbeknownst to most of us ordinary folk, TNB is pushing hard for the use of nuclear energy for generating electricity. The studies they used to justify going nuclear is biased.

First, they used South Korea as their case in point. South Korea is nothing like Malaysia in terms of the availability of solar energy.

In a year, South Korea would probably enjoy less than six months of effective sunlight for solar energy generation, compared to Malaysia's year-round sunshine.

Secondly, the cost cited by nuclear experts is inaccurate at best. In my opinion, TNB has been ill-advised on the cost of security.

The cost of guarding the nuclear plant itself could easily outweigh the cost of operation and the cost of nuclear waste disposal.

Even though Malaysia is relatively safe from terror attacks, there is no guarantee that terrorists would not target Malaysia in the future.

Having a nuclear plant sitting on Malaysian soil makes us that much more vulnerable to terrorism.

Third, the justification that by the time the plant is opened, we should have proper maintainance procedures in place.

We still don't have a good track record where that is concerned if you see how TNB and our public trains are concerned.

Fourth, First Solar recently opened a RM2bil plant in Kulim. So, we actually have a solar panel manufacturer here on our shore.

Yet, it never occurred to TNB to approach First Solar to setup a solar power plant.

If France, a Mediterranean country, finds using solar energy good enough to be part of its energy-generation needs, then we must ask TNB - why can't Malaysia do the same?


MY COMMENT: Ask TNB? Ha ha ha. The world is plagued with dinosaur technologies because it is secretly run by dinosaur dynasties. Whether the family name happens to be Rameses, Thutmose, Amunhotep, Ming, Han, Sung, Borgia, Medici, Hapsburg, Plantagenet, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Bush, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Windsor, Razak, Taib or Mahathir... we're dealing with powerful bloodlines that absolutely believe they are entitled to ownership and exploitation of the Earth and all her inhabitants.

These are the so-called Master Bloodlines that have utterly misunderstood the meaning of Mastery. They measure the power of a Master by the number of Slaves at his command. Little do they realize that a TRUE MASTER is master only of his own destiny and the way he responds to his environment.

Because they are so reliant on other people's weakness for their own sense of power, they are terrified of technologies that liberate rather than enslave. That's why they are invariably drawn to colossal and expensive methods - especially capital-intensive schemes that can further enslave the human race and ensure that traditional power hierarchies are perpetuated ad infinitum.

The Serbian supergenius, Nikola Tesla, produced a host of breakthrough inventions that might have freed humanity from drudgery and enslavement and enabled real wealth to spread throughout the social spectrum. Of course, he was thwarted at every turn by avaricious and cynical capitalist elites who understood and cared for nothing but profits, profits, and always fatter profits.

We have to stop these desperate dinosaur bloodlines from foisting their destructive technologies on an ignorant and unsuspecting population. Educate yourself now... before it's too late!

[Originally published in this blog on 27 August 2009]

Nuke plant jolts environmentalists


So you're having your first nuclear power plant...

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

"HAIR" REVISITED (featuring songs from the 1979 movie by Milos Forman)

























Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical is a rock musical with a book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni and music by Galt MacDermot. A product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, several of its songs became anthems of the anti-Vietnam War peace movement.

The musical's profanity, its depiction of the use of illegal drugs, its treatment of sexuality, its irreverence for the American flag, and its nude scene caused much comment and controversy. The musical broke new ground in musical theatre by defining the genre of "rock musical", using a racially integrated cast, and inviting the audience onstage for a "Be-In" finale.

Hair tells the story of the "tribe", a group of politically active, long-haired hippies of the "Age of Aquarius" living a bohemian life in New York City and fighting against conscription into the Vietnam War. Claude, his good friend Berger, their roommate Sheila and their friends struggle to balance their young lives, loves and the sexual revolution with their rebellion against the war and their conservative parents and society. Ultimately, Claude must decide whether to resist the draft as his friends have done, or to succumb to the pressures of his parents (and conservative America) to serve in Vietnam, compromising his pacifistic principles and risking his life.

After an Off-Broadway debut in October 1967 at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and a subsequent run in a midtown discothèque space, the show opened on Broadway in April 1968 and ran for 1,750 performances. Simultaneous productions in cities across the United States and Europe followed shortly thereafter, including a successful London production that ran for 1,997 performances. Since then, numerous productions have been staged around the world, spawning dozens of recordings of the musical, including the 3 million-selling original Broadway cast recording.

Some of the songs from its score became Top 10 hits, and a feature film adaptation [directed by Miloš Forman] was released in 1979. A Broadway revival opened on March 31, 2009, earning strong reviews and winning the Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for best revival of a musical. In 2008, Time magazine wrote, "Today Hair seems, if anything, more daring than ever."

[Source: Wikipedia]

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

THE INEVITABLE DISSOLUTION OF A CORRUPT AND EVIL REGIME... (REPRISE)








Mother Earth is rapidly ascending to a subtler level of atomic frequency and will NOT support any lifeform that is not in its full integrity.

Najib Razak and his Umno/BN regime are obviously NOT in their full integrity. Their malignant scheme to parasite off honest, decent citizens is DOOMED TO UTTER FAILURE.

PEOPLE OF MALAYSIA, YOU ARE THE CHANGE YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR! BLESS YOU ALL AND YOUR BEAUTIFUL RAINBOW CHILDREN WHO WILL BUILD A GLORIOUS NEW MALAYSIA IN FREEDOM, JUSTICE AND TRUTH.


[First published 1 August 2009. 
Street action pics courtesy of Malaysiakini]



Monday, July 16, 2012

A satellite's eye-view of our beautiful and beloved planet...



There have been some amazing videos created with photos from the International Space Station, but none quite like this. Tomislav Safundžić, described on his Vimeo page as an 18-year-old who enjoys photography and video editing, composed "This is Our Planet" with photos and video from the Image Science and Analysis Laboratory at the NASA-Johnson Space Center. Edited to "Intro" by The XX, the video offers a spectacular view of the home planet, aurorae, stars, and even parts of the ISS. Col. Ron Garan, an astronaut who has spent 178 days in space, including time aboard the ISS last year, posted the video to his Google+ page on Monday night. The ISS orbits Earth at an average altitude of about 250 miles and travels at around 17,500 miles per hour. It makes roughly 16 trips around the planet every day. For some more time-lapse videos with footage from the ISS, check out The Journey Home, a video that Garan helped make after he returned to Earth last fall. And for some amazing photos, click over to Safundžić's 500px page.


[Source: Huffington Post. Brought to my attention by Lawrence Hultberg]





NOTE TO REGULAR BLOG READERS: I know many of you are disappointed I seem to have stopped focusing on local politics. No, I haven't withdrawn or given up, in fact, I do keep close tabs on what's happening - but I feel there are enough commentators like Dean Johns, Mariam Mokhtar, Rom Nain, and many others who are doing whatever's necessary to neutralize Najib's low-grade, high-cost corporate spin - no point saying the same old thing over and over again and just getting hotter and hotter under the collar. In the end it's really up to each of us to accept complete responsibility for the kind of software we install in our own heart drives. If you're a cari makan me-first survivalist, that's exactly the kind of vicious, violent, deceitful, deadly dull and mindlessly competitive reality you will create for your own posterity.