SHUT THE FUCK UP, PAK BLAH!

You lost all credibility with me in November 2006 when you chose to cover Najib's arse instead of doing what any credible leader would have done, that is: tell your deputy to go on temporary leave of absence so that police investigations into the Altantuya Shaariibuu murder could proceed unhindered and undistorted by a morally condemned Attorney-General and a self-aggrandizing IGP. By failing to do so, you have become tarred with the same despicable brush as all the other sleazebags and slimeballs in Umno - and therefore your neck is no longer worth saving, nor are any of your banal utterances worth publishing.

Infamous stained mattress displayed during 1999 Anwar Trial (Photo courtesy of Malaysiakini)

Each time you open your mouth to comment on the braindead sodomy accusation you only sink deeper into the slimy mud of contemptibility. Do the intelligent thing and rescue an iota of your dignity as prime minister by instructing the police to drop the case at once - because it has seriously damaged Malaysia's international reputation - more so than a million tattooed and transgendered sodomites staging an anal sex carnival on live TV could blemish our image as a civilized nation.

Only thing you have going for you is the fact that Mahathir hates your guts. That alone makes you a lot less obnoxious than most of your benighted colleagues in Umno. Your avuncular aura and gentlemanly stance also ensure that people tend to spare you the worst insults. However, your hands are just as dirty and bloodstained as Najib's since you are fully complicit in the Altantuya cover-up - don't kid yourself that anyone believes you're Mr Clean!

I challenge you to prove me wrong. Sack Musa Hassan and Gani Patail for falsifying evidence to ensure Anwar's conviction in 1999. Then order Najib to go on leave while you investigate how many generals he has bought off with lucrative contracts. After that you can stun us all by hauling up Mahathir, Tengku Adnan, V.K. Lingam, Vincent Tan and Ahmaid Fairuz for a thorough grilling - before charging them with manipulating the appointment of judges and influencing the outcome of trials. Do that today and tomorrow I'll say something really nice about you. Promise!

Too Expensive To Blog From A Cybercafe (But How To Stop?)

I've been at this dimly lit cybercafe for the last two hours, catching up on the local news through Malaysiakini and Malaysia Today. Never a dull moment. Anwar released after being subject to major harassment, indignity and extreme discomfort. RPK roped in, only to be released on bail within a couple of hours. Now I can leave the cybercafe with a much lighter heart. For the last 48 hours I have endured genuine anxiety on behalf of Anwar and RPK. I care deeply about the well-being and freedom of these two national heroes who are doing what I myself would gladly do if I had chosen the political path. The bullshit they go through for our sake and that of our posterity may seem mild compared with what others have been subjected to in countries like Cambodia, Burma, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Chile, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nonetheless, I thank such public figures every single day for their heroic acts, because they keep the idea of freedom, justice and truth alive even through the darkest night of authoritarian misrule. I know we must be thankful that Malaysia is relatively less violent than some countries where political dissidents face arrest, torture and summary execution by hooded death squads. But why can't we compare ourselves with countries like New Zealand, Australia and Norway instead?

Anyway, July 16 will remain embedded in my memory as among the darkest days in recent memory. The totally unwarranted and unjustifiable arrest of Anwar Ibrahim came close to shattering all my hopes of a peaceful transition for Malaysia from the stinky and stupid BN era to a new political dawn with Pakatan Rakyat administering the country. The sheer insanity of a country that sends a UTK (Special Action Unit) team out in terrorist-style balaclavas and a convoy of police vehicles to nab a guy whose only crime is that he has set his sights on the nation's top post! Come on, let's grow up, people.


Only a not-happening no-hoper like Mukhriz Mahathir would stand up in Parliament and foam at the mouth like Shabery Cheek about "unnatural sex acts" - as though there are no worse crimes that occur at any given moment. In the first place, whoever labeled anal and oral sex as "punishable crimes" requires immediate psychological counseling and deep emotional therapy. Rape is a no-no, that's for sure - but that Saiful fella certainly didn't look like somebody who had just been repeatedly raped when he smiled for the press photographers soon after lodging a police report against Anwar. Indeed, he looked like some dimwit kid who can't get over the fact that he has become an overnight sensation across the nation and that thousands were Googling his name and even visiting his girlfriend's inane blog.

The prime cause of BN's inevitable downfall may well prove to be a 28-year-old Mongolian beauty who found herself in extremely bad company and got blown up trying to collect her rightful share of ill-gotten gains. No matter how many formal denials issue from the pink lips of Najib Razak or his reprehensible spouse Rosmah Mansor, ugly rumors will persist until the murder case is finally resolved to the public's satisfaction. And the only way that can happen is for the DPM to take temporary leave and allow himself and his wife to be summoned to court as key witnesses.

UMNO'S NEW IMAGE?

Where's Frodo when we need him to deliver the Ring of Power to Mount Doom... and destroy it forever?

THEY SAID IT BEST!

"Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground,
and I'll show you a man who can't get his pants off." - Author Unknown

"God has no religion." - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

"If government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. Government contains impure ingredients - as anybody who's looked at Congress can tell you... Government should be against the law. Term limits aren't enough. We need jail." - P.J. O'Rourke

"Progress may have been a good thing once, but it's gone on far too long." - Ogden Nash



"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein

"We cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein

"If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live." - Lin Yutang

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell

We Interrupt This Program...

CULTURE IS YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM

From the Wikipedia entry on Terence McKenna...

Terence McKenna grew up in Paonia, Colorado. He was introduced to geology through his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the arroyos near his home. From this he developed a deep artistic and scientific appreciation of nature.

At age 16, McKenna moved to, and attended high school in, Los Altos, California. He was introduced to psychedelics through The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley and Village Voice. One of his early experiences with them came through morning glory seeds (containing LSA), which he claimed showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing."

After graduating from high school, McKenna enrolled in U.C. Berkeley. He moved to San Francisco during the Summer Of Love before his classes began, and was introduced to cannabis by Barry Melton in 1965 and tried LSD soon later.

As a freshman at UC Berkeley McKenna participated in the Tussman Experimental College, a short-lived two-year program on the Berkeley campus. He graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology and Conservation. One of McKenna's most widely-promulgated ideas is known as Novelty theory. It predicts the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. McKenna developed the theory in the mid-1970s after his experiences in the Amazon at La Chorrera led him to closely study the King Wen sequence of the I-Ching. Novelty theory involves ontology, extropy, and eschatology.

The theory proposes that the universe is an engine designed for the production and conservation of novelty. Novelty, in this context, can be thought of as newness, or extropy (a term coined by Max More meaning the opposite of entropy). According to McKenna, when novelty is graphed over time, a fractal waveform known as "timewave zero" or simply the "timewave" results. The graph shows at what time periods, but never at what locations, novelty increases or decreases.

Considered by some to represent a model of history's most important events, the universal algorithm has also been extrapolated to be a model for future events. McKenna admitted to the expectation of a "singularity of novelty", and that he and his colleagues projected many hundreds of years into the future to find when this singularity (runaway "newness" or extropy) could occur. The graph of extropy had many enormous fluctuations over the last 25,000 years, but amazingly, it hit an asymptote at exactly December 22, 2012. In other words, entropy (or habituation) no longer exists after that date. It is impossible to define that state. The technological singularity concept parallels this, only at a date roughly three decades later. According to leading expert Ray Kurzweil), another concept called cultural singularity (essentially cultural dissolution, or language dissolution), parallels this as well. Terence claimed to have no knowledge of the Mayan calendar, which ends one day before the Timewave graph does: December 21, 2012. This is likely to be true as Mckenna's timewave theory was published in The Invisible Landscape 12 years before the book which brought the Mayan calendar into public consciousness; José Argüelles's The Mayan Factor.

THE PSYCHEDELIC SOCIETY (47-MIN LECTURE)

Are We A Nation of Thieves?

A few hours after I paid my June phone bill online, my land line went dead. It must have been in the wee hours of July 5th, a Saturday. A couple of friends were kind enough to lodge a 100 report on my behalf and I called Hamdan, my Telekom contact in Kuala Kubu Bharu, who said a technical team from Rawang would be sent up to sort out the problem on Sunday. So I had to monitor the Kelana Jaya Stadium Protes Event from a cybercafe in KKB. Sunday came and went. Still no phone service! I called up Hamdan again and he said the Rawang crew had inspected the equipment and everything was working fine. So how come I still had no service? Hamdan went up to take a look and called me with the bad news: "Thieves have stolen a section of the cable near the bridge!" This is the third time this has happened. The first couple of times it took nearly two weeks to get my land line up again - because right after one section of cable was replaced, the same gang struck again and stole another cable section! To make matters worse, the Telekom techies used the wrong type of cable (one that didn't support Streamyx) and so they had to do the job all over again. Each time this sort of breakdown happens, I add another entry to Mahathir's long list of crimes against Malaysians.

Why Mahathir? He's the Bloody Nincompoop who privatized (read, piratized) our essential telephony, electricity, water, and train services by handing them on a silver platter to his Umno cronies who swiftly proceeded to make them even more inefficient - and, in the case of Telekom, the privatization exercise included the creation of a whole slew of private limited Bumi companies owned and operated by former Telekom employees who were given exclusive contracts to supply components, install wiring, and undertake cable replacement. That in itself need not be a problem. However, these crony companies have a very different attitude to service than your typical Chinaman run auto workshop. If your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, chances are you'll be rescued by a roadside workshop who will tell you in 15 minutes what part needs replacing and then proceed to phone a parts supplier in the nearest town. Within an hour a guy on motorbike will arrive with the required part and within another 30 minutes your car will be on the move again. Now, if only Telekom Malaysia and its associated suppliers had this sort of work ethic!

Instead, the technical team from Rawang that supposedly checked the equipment on Sunday saw that the relay switches were functioning fine and didn't even bother making a test call on the line. Then they would have known it was dead and perhaps would have discovered that a cable section was missing. Instead they turned around and went home, believing their job was done. So on Monday did they get the problem fixed? Of course not! What they did was send a team out to Shah Alam to obtain the replacement cable from their store. That's right, that took an entire day to accomplish. Hopefully, today, they will manage to get the cable replaced and my phone line will be working again. But with Telekom Malaysia on the job, one can never assume anything. Betul TM = Tak Malu. It must be obvious to anyone with half a brain that in Malaysia mono-ethnic companies simply don't work - especially if they're in high-pressure businesses like airlines, commuter train and telco services.

Why is the crime rate so high in Malaysia? Just look at our so-called leaders in the Barisan Nasional. All they have done in the last 25 years is steal from the Rakyat - whether it's Petronas revenues or submarine deals or even Chinese New Year decorations, they grab whatever they can any chance they get. Right after the March 8th election results came in, Umno stste governments began looting their offices of computers, printers, fax machines, even furniture - while furiously shredding whatever evidence might incriminate them. Even their wives quickly stole state money intended for charities. Have the police been around to investigate these Umno wives? Crime has become part of the national culture! Now, no thanks to Najib, murder may become the Malaysian way to cover up corrupt deals and politically embarrassing liaisons. Am I being unfair to prejudge the man? Hey, just read those chubby pink lips!

(Photo courtesy of Tian Chua)

BUSH THE REPTILIAN SHAPESHIFTER!

[Forwarded by Jason Rao]

BUSH CHARGED WITH MURDER

About the book

In The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Bugliosi presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq. Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses—a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world.

As a prosecutor who is dedicated to seeking justice, Bugliosi, in his inimitable style, delivers a non-partisan argument, free from party lines and instead based upon hard facts and pure objectivity. A searing indictment of the President and his administration, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder also outlines a legally credible pathway to holding our highest government officials accountable for their actions, thereby creating a framework for future occupants of the oval office.

Vincent Bugliosi calls for the United States of America to return to the great nation it once was and can be again. He believes the first step to achieving this goal is to bring those responsible for the war in Iraq to justice.

HAPPY "INTERDEPENDENCE DAY" TO ALL MY AMERICAN FRIENDS & VISITORS. WE IN MALAYSIA HAVE TO DEAL WITH OUR OWN FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD HOODLUMS-IN-GOVERNMENT TOO! NOW READ WHAT MY BUDDY SWAMI BEYONDANANDA HAS TO SAY...

How We Can Break the Soundless Barrier and Bring Down the Irony Curtain

by Steve Bhaerman (July 3, 2008)

"We no longer have a free press. We have a brainwashing machine stuck on spin."

In case you missed it, there was a front page story two weeks ago that most newspapers - like our own "liberal" San Francisco Chronicle - treated as a no-page story. While those of us in the Bay Area were offered a front page analysis of Tiger Woods' injury and the latest doings of penguins at the zoo, a former commanding general in Iraq accused the Bush Administration of war crimes.

You didn't hear about it? Well, obviously you weren't supposed to. In the preface to a report prepared by Physicians for Human Rights, Maj. General Antonio Taguba (USA-Ret.), who led the U.S. Army's investigation into the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal, wrote: "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

So, let's see. An American general accuses the Commander-in-Chief of committing war crimes, and it doesn't even make the news. The last time an American general accused the President of committing war crimes was ... uh ... never. In other words, something truly new happens, and it's not even "news." Our so-called "free press" is free to report freely on any story it likes, provided it doesn't rock the ship of state. I've said it before, but it - sadly - bears repeating. The main difference between the corporate media and Pravda is that the Soviet citizens knew they were being lied to.

We no longer have a free press. We have a brainwashing machine stuck on spin.

So if we're wondering why impeachment and war crimes have gotten no traction, well ... welcome to Not-See America, where the press makes it easier and easier for Americans to "not see" what should be all too obvious. Fortunately, as the "up-wising" continues, Americans across the political spectrum are waking up and wising up. Unfortunately, they are finding their voices intentionally silenced by a media monopoly that does more than "cover" the most important stories of our day - it smothers them to death. I guess that's what they mean by "blanket coverage."

However, there is one way to break the story of the most dangerous and toxic regime in American history through the "soundless barrier." It can be done without demonstrations (one of the lessons the powers in power learned in the Vietnam War is to pay no attention to them), petitions, civil disobedience, fasting, etc. It is using the two weapons we the people still have in our arsenal - the marketplace and the meeting place.

Vincent Bugliosi, the former Los Angeles County prosecutor who helped convict the Manson family and wrote a book about it, Helter Skelter (touted as the # 1 True Crime Bestseller of all time) has written a new book called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. In it, he lays out what the book jacket describes as "a nonpartisan argument, free from party lines, based upon hard facts and pure objectivity." In other words, the very book America needs right now. Needless to say, finding a review of this book ... well, it's like finding those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

[Illustration: Abu Ghraib 37 (2005), by Fernando Botero]