PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT... OR TEN (repost)

One of the wonderful features of blogs and online news portals is that they offer a measure of interactivity. Readers are encouraged to put in their two bits worth by leaving comments. Some find it quite hard to resist while others simply can't make themselves do it - either because they're paranoid about leaving any traces in cyberspace by which the Special Branch or Interpol can track them down; or because they're the sort who have trouble pissing in a public urinal if there's a stranger standing right next to them.
Over the past three years I must have left a trail of comments in cyberspace even Mr Magoo can follow. I can pee just about anywhere, possibly even on stage with a spotlight shining on my willy. One of my unique talents, I guess. Anyway, I've collected several longish comments I've left in various places like a trail of dog piss - some fairly recent, some more than a year old - and I figure it would be fun to turn them into a blogpost, so here goes...

"1Malaysia is about fostering unity amongst Malaysians. What measures can be taken to foster greater unity?"
When the government is TOO BIG and the people are too small, you get a Humpty Dumpty situation - exactly like we do now. Why is the government TOO BIG? Simple. The people who form the government were mostly born into the ruling elite and groomed to take over the reins of power. Their ingrained attitudes, lifestyles, thought processes and behavioral patterns ARE the problem - nothing else! If they had the wisdom to step down from power and let others take over, there may be a ray of hope. But I doubt that anyone already rich and powerful would ever look in the mirror and admit: "Ah, I see... the problem is ME!"

Here's a small bit of wisdom I shall leave you with: TRUE COMMUNICATION IS ONLY EVER POSSIBLE AMONGST EQUALS. What does this mean? Where a feudal hierarchy continues to exist, those on the lower rungs of the power structure will never express their true feelings for fear of losing their jobs or even their heads. They will, instead, resort to subtle sabotage and apathetic performance, slowly but surely wearing down the machinery of governance until nothing works anymore.

ISLAMIC VALUES

If only espousing Islamic values would make us kinder, more honest, more compassionate, and a great deal wiser... but in Malaysia these so-called Islamic values appear to be totally degraded, warmed over dregs of the ugliest species of cruelty and tyranny inspired by the erotophobic and wrathful Old Testament God of Abraham. That might explain why our law enforcement agencies in particular seem to have become repositories of sadism, perversity and absolute inhumanity - earning the country a vile reputation for being an active participant in human trafficking and for being tragically benighted when it comes to treating refugees, cultural deviants and political dissidents with the love and respect due all living beings. As defenders and upholders of Islam, the monarchs must be held fully responsible for the grotesque distortions and hypocrisies surrounding their exploitative, feudalistic, self-serving and unenlightened interpretation of Islam.

ON THE INCURABLE DR MAHATHIR

There's a name for this narcissistic old man's problems. I think it's called hoof-in-mouth disease. But somehow the press insist on quoting him just to add more mental pollution to an already murky political atmosphere.

Can someone please embalm him immediately?

MORAL POLICE

Hard to believe, in the final phase of our journey through linear time, with a massive paradigm shift and mind-boggling quantum jump directly ahead of us... there are religiocentric humans of the Enlilite/Yahwehist lineage still obstinately pursuing their self-destructive, self-limiting goal of damming up all the ways vital energy (chi or prana) flows in the universe by subjecting every individual incarnate soul to all sorts of idiotic legislation. And they have the audacity to do so in the name of "stability" when what best serves us is DYNAMISM!

So much for this suffocating plastic bag called "society." I opt for true community, spontaneously born of natural communion between souls.

ANWAR vs NAJIB

Don't fall for the MSM spin that simplifies everything to a boxing match between two heavyweights. Lean back and see the big picture. Learn from the cogent metaphors mythology offers. Have you read Tolkien or seen Lord of the Rings? The all-pervasive psychic poison of Sauron, the corruption and zombification of the Nine Kings who turn into the Nine Ringwraiths (Nazgul), the fall of Saruman... all these characters live amongst us - and within us - even if they wear sarongs and songkoks or custom-tailored suits and Italian shoes.

How do we define EVIL? That which thwarts your soul evolution and harvests your energy to serve ignoble and demeaning purposes. Use this yardstick and you will never again be misled by professional misleaders spouting platitudes and lying from every orifice. Stand firm for freedom, justice and spontaneous joy!

HARAPAN BARU

So long as BN continues to hold the national pursestrings and control the machinery of federal government, participatory democracy will remain a pipe dream. Whenever the BN regime cites "national security reasons" what they mean is "Barisan Nasional security." They cannot to afford to lose their stranglehold on the mass media, the judiciary and the police. Without these powerful tools of oppression, the majority of BN leaders will be hawking unsold indelible ink at the pasar malam.

I want Anwar Ibrahim and Pakatan Rakyat to take over as soon as humanly possible. Anwar and most of the new leaders in Pakatan Rakyat have been on the receiving end of injustice, abuse of the law, and negative media coverage by the BN-controlled channels. The first thing they must attend to - even more important than reducing fuel and food prices - is the abolition of all the archaic, authoritarian laws (ISA, OSA, PPPA, UUCA, and so on) that have effectively suppressed the voices of honest critics and created a climate of fear.

We do not want our children to grow up as zombies, interested in nothing but brainless consumption of disposable diversions. We don't want them to fear the public servants whose salaries we pay and whose ill-gotten gains have been acquired at our expense. We the people must solemnly vow to embody the ideals we wish to see in the words, deeds, and thoughts of our elected leaders. We must become the positive change we long to see!

WHY ANWAR IBRAHIM PROVOKES IRRATIONAL HATRED

Strange how some people - even well-educated and apparently intelligent ones, and I’m sad to say I have several close friends who fall in this category - have an irrational hatred for Anwar Ibrahim.

Some are secular, westernized Malays who would rather deal with the greedy, corrupt liars and hypocrites who populate the BN than with a leader who is actually clean-living and left-leaning. Others insist Anwar is a closet racist and opportunist who will woo anybody to get where he wants. Now that’s patently unfair a criticism; one might as well condemn all living things for their hardwired survival instincts. After all, every one of us can be accused of exactly the same ability to manipulate and mold reality so that it serves and supports us. It's how we do it - whether by inspiring love or instilling fear - that makes all the difference.

What I strongly believe is that most of these Anwar-haters are people who were once idealists, but became pragmatists in their adulthood. They conformed to the Status Quo and reaped personal benefits (contracts, positions, titles) by toeing the Umno/BN line. So when they see Anwar at 61 still holding on to the principles of his crusading youth, still gung-ho about REFORM, it makes them uncomfortable about their own Faustian pact with the powers-that-be.

They have what used to be a typically Australian complex: if a local boy returns to his hometown after accomplishing great deeds abroad, the yokels shun him as being “too big for his boots.” These people live such humdrum, mediocre lives - with so many compromises - they simply can’t bear to see a REAL HERO get his just desserts. Like what happened to Jesus 2,000 years ago, they will attempt to arrest and crucify the bugger… and, maybe 300 years later, proclaim him a saint or a god when he’s long gone and no further threat to their vested interests.

BADAWI'S ABYSMAL FAILURE

How banal and dreary to read about Badawi "lashing out" at the new DAP government during his visit to Penang. No manners, no code of ethics, no fresh ideas. Just recycling the same old robotic hogwash, the same old braindead Umno rhetoric. Still wagging finger and tongue at phantoms in his own cobwebby mind. Would he were capable of showing signs of intelligence and responsiveness to rapidly changing circumstances by saying something simple and sincere like: "Let's move on from the elections and forge new levels of Federal-State cooperation to the benefit of the whole country. In the end, no matter what our political leanings and perceived differences, let us never forget we are first and foremost Malaysians."

With each new twist in the post-electoral plot, with each inane and all-too-predictable utterance, Badawi is sending out an unmistakeable signal that his political worldview is dead and done for, beyond hope of redemption or resurrection.

Nevertheless, I thank Badawi for having played his role in the drama. For all his grandiloquent mediocrity, he at least created a little more space for dissent. He allowed Anwar Ibrahim his freedom and was generally so unintimidating (unlike his predecessor) that during the four years of his first term as PM, we saw more and more Malaysians emboldened and empowered.

ON MEDIA OBJECTIVITY

“Objectivity” doesn’t really exist except as an excuse for not accepting full responsibility for one’s perceptions, opinions, and beliefs. For too many generations we have been left-brained biased - exalting rational thought above irrational feelings. But in nature, what we call ”irrational feelings” are actually our instincts, our gut responses that operate from cellular wisdom. A society trapped in its mind and disconnected from its heart (where instincts are experienced as emotions) is already on its way to becoming mechanical and robotic. This may suit the control freak and wannabe dictator within us - but it’s deleterious to our psycho-spiritual well-being. Being desensitized to our instinctual responses is akin to filtering out 99% of sensory and extra sensory data and making “logical” decisions based on only 1%.

This explains how so many can be tricked into believing in and voting for a clone like George W. Bush, for example, who emanates almost zero empathy and is, therefore, only fractionally human. It’s alarming when people are no longer able to detect energy fields - or have been trained to distrust extrasensory insights picked up by intuition. Otherwise they would automatically recoil from repugnant political entities spouting lifeless cliches and lying through every orifice. They never would have been fooled by the puppet show and 99% of the politicians currently in power would be selling insurance or involved in MLM schemes.

SAIFUL & SODOMY II

Study Saiful Bukhari's face. There's something there that reminds me of Khairy Jamaluddin. Shrinks today will label it "bi-polar disorder." In the good old days it was known as "schizophrenia." That's right, it's the proverbial Jekyll-Hyde complex - or Smeagol-Gollum syndrome if you prefer your metaphors up-to-date. What I see looking at Saiful's face is a kid who hasn't made up his mind whether to be "good" or "bad." There's a certain boyish charm and innocence there, a useful survival skill, and he seems very keen on being accepted and loved by his peers (read Saiful's blog comments on Riwayat Hayat in response to suggestions that he's a "musang berbulu ayam").

He volunteers his services to the PKR campaign. However, he also likes being photographed with Umno bigwigs and by now everybody has seen Saiful posing beside Najib's special agent Khairil Anas Jusoh (himself rumored to be gay) at the DPM's office. So if that resignation email is from Saiful (and I don't see who else might have written it for him, though he may have been instructed to tender his resignation before incriminating Anwar), it reveals a young man torn between loyalties and, ultimately, feeling himself unworthy to continue serving as Anwar's special assistant (perhaps because he found himself actually liking and admiring his boss), he does an amok on himself, going for the notoriety he knows will be his lot (in the same way a weak character like Mark David Chapman would choose to assassinate John Lennon, the man he admires, since he can never aspire to match his hero's accomplishments).

And what about KJ? When I met him back in 1999 he was working at NTV7 as a talkshow host and news producer. He was bright and smug and actually very polite but I could sense the young man's burning desire to make his mark, to really make it big. I think we did exchange a few pleasantries before we parted and my parting words to the young KJ may have been: "You have a lot going for you, but keep a tight rein on that ego!" He was certainly nothing like the KJ I saw on Malaysiakini.tv rabble-rousing for Umno at the Ijok by-election. Humans are not one-dimensional and to expect them to be is to dehumanize them. Life, like politics, is rarely a black-and-white affair. Even Lady Macbeth has a story to tell and, although one is wise to avoid marrying anyone like her, one ought to grant her her humanity - on condition she doesn’t ascend to the throne, of course!

A REGIME GONE MAD

Some long-dead Greek pederast once said: "Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." Ever since the macabre tale of a murdered Mongolian woman being blown to bits with C4 exploded in the international media, every move those BN/Umno sleazebags have made has been counterproductive and countersurvival. The gods are merciful in that they first drive insane those marked for doom. So be not surprised at the erratic behavior of the BN/Umno goondus - they are non compos mentis! You have to be a fucking lunatic to believe you can get away with stealing so much of the Rakyat's wealth over so many decades and that the Rakyat will never awaken from their zombie trance or break the evil pukau* wrought by the MSM!

____

*pukau - primitive but powerful Indonesian magic that puts you in a state of deep sleep or paralysis while your house is being burgled.

[First posted 27 November 2009]

"Take two tablets twice daily..."

The Tablets of Stone, Stone Tablets, Tablets of Law, or Tablets of Testimony (in Hebrew: לוחות הברית Luchot HaBrit - "the tablets [of] the covenant") in the Bible, were the two pieces of special stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments when Moses ascended Mount Sinai as recorded in the Book of Exodus. Exodus 31:18 refers to the tablets as the "Tablets of Testimony."[Source: Wikipedia]

"But... but... we're still in the Analog Era!"

"How much should we retail these for?"

Only 30 centuries down the line... Time flies!

Moses presents the latest Tablet of Testimony 
(15th century painting by Andrea Mantegna)

"Moses with his Tablet" (by Michelangelo)

Steve "Moses" Jobs, the street-savvy dude 
who offered an Apple to Eve in 1976, 
now attempts to seduce her 
with something even sexier...

It must be the onset of womenopause...

(That's another name for "male menopause," my dear).

Lately, I've been thinking about TABLETS...

But the idea of being online wherever I go strikes me as

rather dangerous. 
After all, the whole point of traveling away from

my comfort zone is to get away from the internet!

At this point in time, I have yet to decide 
whether to treat myself 

to a smartphone or a tablet 
(in anticipation of some unexpected windfall).

I'd like to get some feedback from 
those of you who own smartphones as well as tablets: 

if you had space for only one device,

which would you lug around with you?

Early manifestations of The Tablet...

It has been around for eons... 

It just wasn't commercially viable... 
until Adam took a bite of the Apple 
and decided it was pretty cool. 

The Interminable & Indeterminable Talkin’ Telekom Blues

Just got back online after another 4-day breakdown in phone & internet services. This is a tribute of sorts to Telekom Malaysia...

My childhood memories of Telekom go back to a time when it was still called Pejabat Telecoms and served the public as a government department. Those were days when you would find a big room full of telephone operators tasked with connecting one customer to another. When you picked up the phone, you would hear a sweet female voice saying: “Telecoms. Can I help you?” You would tell her the number or give her a name and address – and she would say, “Just a minute!” before connecting you. At night, you'd hear a male voice.

Later telephones came with a built-in dialer so you could make local calls directly without going through the operator – but for overseas calls you had to dial 108 and the operator would call you back when the connection was made. I didn’t have any personal dealings with Telecoms as a kid – although I met a telephone operator at a party and enjoyed a bit of harmless adolescent flirting whenever she happened to pick up my call.

My negative perception of Telekom Malaysia began in the mid-1970s when I first applied for a telephone account under my own name. I was told I would have to wait for lines to become available in my area. I wasn’t living in Puchong or Nibong Tebal at the time – I was smack in KL’s diplomatic enclave - 7 Pesiaran Ampang Hilir, just across the road from the Swiss ambassador’s residence.  I couldn’t believe there was a shortage of telephone lines in this prestigious area.

So I wrote a long but courteous and helpful letter to the Minister of Postal Services and Telecommunications. Dead silence from yet another rude and unresponsive public servant. In his shoes, I would have invited the writer of that letter to a personal meeting – and offered him a contract to help upgrade telephone services and improve the public image of Telekom Malaysia.

At the time I had just taken over as sole proprietor of a partnership company I had started in 1974 with two other friends. A phone was crucial to working from home. Without this basic lifeline I was forced to depend on public phones and messages left at a friend’s office. After more than a year struggling to keep the company going, I was offered a full-time job in a big advertising agency and decided to accept. Fortunately I had only one employee and he was very understanding when I explained that I was folding up the company.

The phone line was finally installed, nearly two years later, when I no longer urgently needed it.

Recently I attempted to work out an approximation of how much I have paid since 1976 for the use of the basic telephone – a communication tool that has been around since 1876, though telecommunications only became a viable industry many decades later. It’s hard to get a precise figure because the fluctuations over the years have been dramatic (ranging from an average of, say, M$36 a month in the 1970s to as much M$800 in the 1980s when I acquired a taste for long-distance girlfriends). A conservative estimate would be something like RM60,000 – but it wouldn’t surprise me if the actual amount topped RM100,000.

In May 2002 I optimistically applied for a land line when I relocated from Kuala Kubu Bharu town to Pertak Village about 8 miles up the Fraser’s Hill road. I was told no lines were available – the area was too remote. I wrote several letters to editors of various newspapers lamenting the poor attitude of Telekom Malaysia. None ever saw the light of day.

When Mahathir privatized the phone company in 1987, Syarikat Telekom Malaysia Berhad inherited the existing infrastructure along with all existing customers, which must have numbered in the millions. The company, even though now a profit-making enterprise, had a moral obligation to provide telecommunication services to all Malaysians, regardless of their location.

If Telekom Malaysia had been farsighted, it would have invested at the outset in wireless telephony using communications satellites. Instead, the company opted for optic fiber cables, which they installed piecemeal – so that the high-end urban customers were able to enjoy broadband services while low-end rural users had to settle for the existing copper cable network. The result was a haphazard, piecemeal telecommunications system fraught with maintenance problems, connectivity issues, and extremely patchy service.

Three years after I applied for a phone line I noticed that telephone posts were being erected along the Fraser’s Hill road from KKB. Eventually the posts reached the entrance of Pertak Village – and then stopped. Ever hopeful, I enquired at the KKB Kedai Telekom about the prospects of finally getting some service. I was informed that there was no plan to pull a line into the village just to serve one customer.

I pointed out that the telephone posts had reached right to the entrance of the village - and my house was only a few hundred yards away. “Oh, that’s for the exclusive use of the Sultan,” I was told. I was incredulous. TM had just spent close to a million ringgit setting up an optic fiber line to the Sultan’s weekend lodge and they weren’t bothered to satisfy one paying customer by extending the line a short distance further…

Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah

This prompted a letter to the Sultan of Selangor, c.c.’ed to a couple of dailies and the CEO of TM, pointing out the absurdity of the situation: TM had bent over backwards to provide a broadband connection to someone who only required it on very rare occasions and probably never had to pay his phone bills - yet they were unable or unwilling to extend the service to a regular paying customer. The silence was deafening.

For three years I had been going to a local internet café on a daily basis, spending RM4-10 each time, and on top of that I had to fork out an additional RM60 a month on prepaid mobile top-ups. One afternoon at the internet café, somebody approached me, requesting that I park my van a little further down the road (it was right in front of the MIC branch office).

G. Palanivel

“What’s going on, why are so many people coming to the MIC office?” I asked. I was told the deputy minister of rural development, Dato’ G. Palanivel, was arriving soon to meet his constituents. When I finished my session, I noticed there were still a lot of people milling around the MIC office. On impulse I went up the stairs and asked to talk to Palanivel.

I explained my telephone woes to the deputy minister, who responded by asking me to exchange mobile numbers with Mr Rama, his personal assistant, who was tasked with following up on our brief discussion. To my utter surprise I got a call from Rama the very next day, informing me that his boss would be in the vicinity the following Monday and asking if I would be at home because the Dato’ was thinking of dropping by. “Most certainly I will be waiting for him,” I said.

I had anticipated that Palanivel would arrive with a small entourage – but I burst out laughing when I saw that he was accompanied by a large convoy of vehicles, including a Bernama TV crew and a clutch of reporters from the vernacular press. Also in spritely attendance were officials from the Rawang branch of Telekom Malaysia, a couple of JKR engineers, and two senior JHEOA officers.

“Ah, Dato’ Palanivel, how sweet of you to come all the way here,” I smiled. “Sorry, we have a very tiny veranda and can’t accommodate everybody.” So, while Palanivel and the media corps crowded round the table on my veranda for an impromptu press conference, the rest of his entourage milled about the village. With cameras flashing and rolling, Palanivel declared that it was unacceptable that there wasn’t even a public telephone in Pertak Village for use in case of emergencies. He announced that within two weeks he wanted a couple of solar-powered payphones installed – one near the sundry shop and the other in front of the headman’s house. After that, he continued, we will see to it that a proper line is pulled in.

True to his word, the solar-powered payphones were installed within a couple of weeks. It took several more months for the copper line to be set up. When a TM technical crew arrived shortly afterwards to install my land line, they sheepishly told me the copper line was two poles short of my house, and that it would take another few weeks before they could extend it.

And so it passed that after a 3-year wait, I finally got the land line I had applied for in May 2002. However, I had to wait another 18 months before my Streamyx account was activated at the end of July 2006.

For his prompt action in facilitating my phone line, I will always have a kind word for G. Palanivel. He struck me as a savvy, down-to-earth politician, who immediately saw my complaint as an opportunity to gain a bit of PR mileage for himself. The Star carried the story the next day and I believe the press conference with this pro-active deputy minister of rural development was televised nationwide too.

So this is how things work in Bolehland. You have to rope in at least a deputy minister just to obtain something as routine as a phone line. Why didn’t it occur to TM to do what they are supposed to do? Because they didn’t see me as a VIP. A totally unhealthy attitude, I must say, since most VIPs don’t even pay their own phone bills.

However, this is not the end of the story. It appears there will never be an end to my telephone woes so long as TM exists as a privatized monopoly and doesn’t give a damn for any customer who doesn’t qualify as a “VIP.”

When TM set up the Sultan’s optic fiber line, they decided to install the terminal right within the compound of his weekend lodge. The outcome was that every time there is a breakdown, the technicians must first obtain the keys from the Sultan’s security guards before they can access the terminal. And since the Sultan is so rarely present at his RM6 million lakeside retreat, the guards aren’t always where they are supposed to be. Sometimes it takes up to 3 or 4 days before the TM repair team can gain access to do their work.

I experience a service breakdown approximately once every two or three months. What ought to be a 30-minute routine repair job usually takes at least a week to get done. And if sections of the optic fiber cable happen to be missing (due to vandalism or theft) I end up having to wait two weeks or more for the service to be restored.

I don’t blame the TM personnel on the ground for their endemic lack of motivation. Most of them have the attitude of civil servants because they joined TM before it became privatized and many are close to retirement. The younger ones usually don’t stay very long with TM because the top-heavy management is too steeped in the feudal ethos to notice their individual abilities and reward them appropriately.

Another stumbling block issues from the near-sighted manner in which TM resolved the problem of overstaffing during the privatization process. To streamline the workforce, TM must have offered an early retirement option to the veterans, while the younger staff were encouraged to start their own businesses as suppliers and given exclusive contracts with TM to install and maintain the system. With no real competition, these small-scale suppliers tend to acquire a rent-seeker mentality and become complacent.

Illustration by Stephen Nix

And the red tape doesn’t help either. The obsession with centralized control creates a 9-headed hydra that may appear fearsome but is in fact a clumsy, inefficient monster that easily loses its sense of direction. Whenever a breakdown occurs, the local technical team often has to call in contractors from Rawang who, in turn, have to order replacement parts from Shah Alam - so repair jobs that ought to be accomplished in a couple of hours can take up to two weeks.

A sorry state of affairs, unavoidable when you have an absolute monopoly and analog minds operating in a digital universe.

It would be tremendous challenge indeed to be assigned the Herculean task of sorting out Telekom Malaysia. Much easier, I believe, to open the market up to innovation. Let other players in. TM could be reinstated as a public sector agency responsible for ensuring maximum access to telecommunications at minimum cost; this way it can stop focusing on profits and be content to generate enough revenue to maintain itself. As a government department TM could play a coordinating role to ensure compatibility and to ensure that vital infrastructures are efficiently maintained.

There can be a happy ending yet to the sad saga of Telekom Malaysia.