well you know what? to hell with ur pretence and apologies. i'm no small kid and i don't buy those easily. u accuse me of raising my voice to you and scolding you. i did not do that and i dont take accusations lightly. you treat me as if i'm a rubbish. so be it. i dont mind coz you're ntg to me also. i know you've been talking bout me behind me, so why don't you gather up ur guts and come tell me face to face?
i wont do good deeds anymore next time bcoz good deeds are always repaid with bad deeds. the saying "buat baik dibalas baik" can go to hell la. the moment i started to believe it could exist is the moment i suffer the backlash.
well fuck this life and fuck everything in it lah. don't want to be nice guy d.
i think i should go back to my preferred stuck-up, cold personality. who cares anyway !
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
UPM: A university, a resort inn or a correctional facility?
By Rustam A. Sani
When I was an entering graduate student at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, USA) in 1978 I remember clearly the welcoming address by the then President of the University, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti.
He was an internationally renown scholar in the field of English Literature and had the reputation of being the youngest person ever to hold the position of the President (equivalent to our Vice-Chancellor) of a top Ivy League university at the tender age of early forties.
In the speech that impressed me to be rather introspective in mood and tone, he invited the newly enrolled graduate students to help him in carrying out the heavy burden of being the President of Yale.
According to him, tasked with the hectic duty of the day to day running of the university, there is a tendency for someone holding the position to slip into what he described as the “innkeeper’s ethos”.
Such an ethos would give the President a false sense of satisfaction as long as he keeps receiving enough paying guests (students) year after year, have every one of the guests’ needs and idiosyncrasies attended to, indeed pampered, and then let them leave after all their outstanding bills are paid.
But the President of Yale, according Prof Giamatti, cannot afford to live by such an innkeeper’s ethos alone. Nor can graduate students like us perceive our role within the institution as paying guests merely seeking temporary and immediate gratification of our mundane needs.
The whole Yale community, he implored, must continue to live and work together as members of a reputable intellectual community in pursuit of scholarly, academic, scientific and creative excellence – in an ambience of study, experiment, discovery and discourse.
Only by defending, indeed renewing and reinforcing, the traditional characteristics of the Yale community, he said, can the real qualities of the reputable, indeed ancient, institution be retained and continually enlarged and enhanced.
After I returned to teach for years at our local universities, indeed helping to run some of their academic programmes, it became painfully obvious to me that one basic weakness, indeed the reason for the continued deterioration, of the local universities as academic and intellectual institutions was the pervasiveness of the innkeeper’s ethos among their leaders (i.e. vice chancellors).
The first university, the Universiti Malaya, which had its root in the colonial period was undergoing its initial rather impressive development under the influence of the great British tradition and model of institutions of higher learning. (I am talking of the ideals and characteristics of the true university here, not just of the use of the English language as medium of instruction).
But by the time this “first” university was reinforced by a number of other universities of the post-independence era, the deterioration in the university tradition in this country has become almost complete – with the vice-chancellors not just labouring under a false satisfaction of the innkeeper’s ethos but indeed as mere “executive” innkeepers labouring to the dictates of the “real owners” of the inns, i.e. the government in power.
With the recent development in the privatisation, commercialisation and, indeed, vocationalisation of higher education in the society, the development of the universities under these executive innkeepers who have not even a basic understanding of, let alone a deep commitment to, the real characteristics of the universities as true intellectual and scholarly institutions has expectedly derailed.
Indeed, with the recent statement of the Vice Chancellor of the Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), [Prof. Datuk Dr.] Nik Mustapha R. Abdullah, in support of his officers’ action of ransacking the hostel room of one of the students and confiscating his personal belongings such as his laptop personal computer, mobile phone and private documents for scrutiny, I detect that even the innkeeper’s ethos has now deteriorated even a notch or two lower.
The vice chancellor is now not just being governed by an innkeeper’s ethos but indeed by a “jailer’s ethos”. He does not just perceive the university to be an inn, but it is indeed a jail in which the “guests” are no more than prisoners who need to be controlled and hemmed in, and their basic personal rights and liberties, normally respected and defended in a decent human society, removed.
The vice chancellor may see his role as defending and promoting the higher good of this society, but everybody else knows that it is nothing more than an attempt to keep his own political masters securely in power – especially with the so-called campus elections lurking round the corner.
It is little wonder, therefore, that an idealistic young man from Tawau, Sabah, by the name of Yee Yang Yang, 19, who hopes to undergo an intellectually liberating experience of being a university student at UPM, is already a frustrated and disillusioned person just three months into the first year of his life as a student in the “fake” university. (Read his views here).
That of course begs the larger question of what UPM really is. Is it a university, a resort inn, or a correctional facility? I believe only the learned vice chancellor can, and should, answer this question.
When I was an entering graduate student at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, USA) in 1978 I remember clearly the welcoming address by the then President of the University, the late A. Bartlett Giamatti.
He was an internationally renown scholar in the field of English Literature and had the reputation of being the youngest person ever to hold the position of the President (equivalent to our Vice-Chancellor) of a top Ivy League university at the tender age of early forties.
In the speech that impressed me to be rather introspective in mood and tone, he invited the newly enrolled graduate students to help him in carrying out the heavy burden of being the President of Yale.
According to him, tasked with the hectic duty of the day to day running of the university, there is a tendency for someone holding the position to slip into what he described as the “innkeeper’s ethos”.
Such an ethos would give the President a false sense of satisfaction as long as he keeps receiving enough paying guests (students) year after year, have every one of the guests’ needs and idiosyncrasies attended to, indeed pampered, and then let them leave after all their outstanding bills are paid.
But the President of Yale, according Prof Giamatti, cannot afford to live by such an innkeeper’s ethos alone. Nor can graduate students like us perceive our role within the institution as paying guests merely seeking temporary and immediate gratification of our mundane needs.
The whole Yale community, he implored, must continue to live and work together as members of a reputable intellectual community in pursuit of scholarly, academic, scientific and creative excellence – in an ambience of study, experiment, discovery and discourse.
Only by defending, indeed renewing and reinforcing, the traditional characteristics of the Yale community, he said, can the real qualities of the reputable, indeed ancient, institution be retained and continually enlarged and enhanced.
After I returned to teach for years at our local universities, indeed helping to run some of their academic programmes, it became painfully obvious to me that one basic weakness, indeed the reason for the continued deterioration, of the local universities as academic and intellectual institutions was the pervasiveness of the innkeeper’s ethos among their leaders (i.e. vice chancellors).
The first university, the Universiti Malaya, which had its root in the colonial period was undergoing its initial rather impressive development under the influence of the great British tradition and model of institutions of higher learning. (I am talking of the ideals and characteristics of the true university here, not just of the use of the English language as medium of instruction).
But by the time this “first” university was reinforced by a number of other universities of the post-independence era, the deterioration in the university tradition in this country has become almost complete – with the vice-chancellors not just labouring under a false satisfaction of the innkeeper’s ethos but indeed as mere “executive” innkeepers labouring to the dictates of the “real owners” of the inns, i.e. the government in power.
With the recent development in the privatisation, commercialisation and, indeed, vocationalisation of higher education in the society, the development of the universities under these executive innkeepers who have not even a basic understanding of, let alone a deep commitment to, the real characteristics of the universities as true intellectual and scholarly institutions has expectedly derailed.
Indeed, with the recent statement of the Vice Chancellor of the Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), [Prof. Datuk Dr.] Nik Mustapha R. Abdullah, in support of his officers’ action of ransacking the hostel room of one of the students and confiscating his personal belongings such as his laptop personal computer, mobile phone and private documents for scrutiny, I detect that even the innkeeper’s ethos has now deteriorated even a notch or two lower.
The vice chancellor is now not just being governed by an innkeeper’s ethos but indeed by a “jailer’s ethos”. He does not just perceive the university to be an inn, but it is indeed a jail in which the “guests” are no more than prisoners who need to be controlled and hemmed in, and their basic personal rights and liberties, normally respected and defended in a decent human society, removed.
The vice chancellor may see his role as defending and promoting the higher good of this society, but everybody else knows that it is nothing more than an attempt to keep his own political masters securely in power – especially with the so-called campus elections lurking round the corner.
It is little wonder, therefore, that an idealistic young man from Tawau, Sabah, by the name of Yee Yang Yang, 19, who hopes to undergo an intellectually liberating experience of being a university student at UPM, is already a frustrated and disillusioned person just three months into the first year of his life as a student in the “fake” university. (Read his views here).
That of course begs the larger question of what UPM really is. Is it a university, a resort inn, or a correctional facility? I believe only the learned vice chancellor can, and should, answer this question.
Mid Autumn, Last Day of Finals
today, er yesterday actually coz it's already 2am now was my last paper for this sem's finals. oh relief !! it was one of the heaviest paper, literature. suprisingly i did very well in my opinion for this paper. i studied rigorously and it paid off lah. maybe because i liked it alot coz it has alot to do wit history and it was like i can memorize every single thing from the note and even extras from wikipedia. in short: FOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY. woohoo. i was ecstatic when the time was up to hand in our papers. this paper i think can get A woh haha.
try to identify the people in here, haha no need la cannot see also.
after the paper went downstairs to chill awhile lo. then it was lunch time. i had two choices. first it was to go with anthony and his friends which i dont really know well but who cares, got cun gal can d lah hor haha. the second choice was with ian's groupie. i chose the second one and truthfully it was a bad choice. spent the whole time discussing about SRC campaign for next year. i was bored to death. should have followed tony and huhuhaha together with taht group la. extra can get to know a few of the cun gals. *slaps myself.haha.
after lunch, went to 1 Utama to bowl and watch movie. bowling was bad, near to sucky. my arms were so tight i couldn't bowl well. even amy had a better score than me :( after bowling, we watched the movie "The Brave One" acted by Jodie Foster. it was good but kinda suspenseful thou. Jodie Foster nvr fails to deliver 1. after movie, it's time to dinner. went to Sentosa Section 17. my first time there. the place is huge. food was kinda sucky. so plain. no taste. din finish it. feel so guilty. in africa so many kids starve to death. haihz~~
next on the itenary was play tanglung at Taman Jaya Lake Park. it wasn't my idea. i din play also. i go there watch oni. ended up having intellectual exchanges and discussions. had quite a fun time.
try to identify the people in here, haha no need la cannot see also.
Monday, September 24, 2007
What really happened in 1988 judicial crisis
6 Supreme Court judges were suspended during that time which means theoretically, the Supreme Court itself had been suspended. How can one of the pillars of the Separation of Powers Concept be suspended? For those of you who dont know much about law and courts, there are 10 Judges in the Supreme Court at that time including the Lord President/CJ.
to know more on what really happened back then, read this. it is an account by Datuk George Seah, one of the judges suspended. you will be shocked to no end.
to know more on what really happened back then, read this. it is an account by Datuk George Seah, one of the judges suspended. you will be shocked to no end.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
More judiciary info and on Tan Sri Zaki Azmi
i know most of you who read the transcripts dont know WHO IS WHO that are mentioned in the conversation and what the acronyms like PCA stand for, so i explain abit here.
CJM- Chief Judge of Malaya
PCA- President Court Of Appeal
CJ - Chief Justice
eusoff chin is the CJ before Dzaiddin. eusoff is a mahathir crony. fairuz is eusoff's gang. fairuz is now the current CJ.
tan sri vincent is the Berjaya Group chairman. its an open secret that he is the "anak angkat" of mahathir. the "anak angkat" of our current PM is Patrick Lim. who is he? check out the controversial PGCC and the house PM stayed in while in Australia.
to understand better on the context of the whole conversation, also read the following.
1. on Fairuz's so called suffering. click here.
2. also read this blog to know more about our judiciary.
On another matter pertaining to Tan Sri Zaki Azmi.
Tan Sri Zaki Tun Azmi will today(5 September 2007) become the first lawyer to be appointed directly to the Federal Court.
(http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/9/5/nation/18783311&sec=nation)
This Zaki Azmi is an UMNO man, apparently he is being appointed to the Federal Court to be our next CJ in case our "beloved" PM cannot get the Rulers consent on extending the contract of Tun Ahmad Fairuz. According to rumours, the Rulers are very unhappy on the performance of Fairuz so they do not want to extend his tenure as CJ. This is where Zaki comes in.
The current PCA and CJM are good judges. Apparently the PM's hand was forced in their appointment by the Rulers because PM wanted to put his men there but the Rulers did not give their consent and so he had to appoint the 2 clean judges taht are liked by the Rulers. Anyway the current PCA and CJM are close to retirement age already so they wont be able to become CJ when Fairuz retires. The PM also wont choose them 1 coz he wants a CJ that is his DOG. Remember Pengajian AM? Appointment of high position judges need persetujuan Majlis Raja-Raja. As a counter-move, the PM put Zaki in the Federal Court. If anything happens, Zaki can be the next CJ and our problems will continue for sure. Zaki isn't as clean as some think he is. check out this.
In my opinion, a Royal Commission should be set up to investigate our Judiciary, clean it up and revamp it to restore the public confidence.
CJM- Chief Judge of Malaya
PCA- President Court Of Appeal
CJ - Chief Justice
eusoff chin is the CJ before Dzaiddin. eusoff is a mahathir crony. fairuz is eusoff's gang. fairuz is now the current CJ.
tan sri vincent is the Berjaya Group chairman. its an open secret that he is the "anak angkat" of mahathir. the "anak angkat" of our current PM is Patrick Lim. who is he? check out the controversial PGCC and the house PM stayed in while in Australia.
to understand better on the context of the whole conversation, also read the following.
1. on Fairuz's so called suffering. click here.
2. also read this blog to know more about our judiciary.
On another matter pertaining to Tan Sri Zaki Azmi.
Tan Sri Zaki Tun Azmi will today(5 September 2007) become the first lawyer to be appointed directly to the Federal Court.
(http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/9/5/nation/18783311&sec=nation)
This Zaki Azmi is an UMNO man, apparently he is being appointed to the Federal Court to be our next CJ in case our "beloved" PM cannot get the Rulers consent on extending the contract of Tun Ahmad Fairuz. According to rumours, the Rulers are very unhappy on the performance of Fairuz so they do not want to extend his tenure as CJ. This is where Zaki comes in.
The current PCA and CJM are good judges. Apparently the PM's hand was forced in their appointment by the Rulers because PM wanted to put his men there but the Rulers did not give their consent and so he had to appoint the 2 clean judges taht are liked by the Rulers. Anyway the current PCA and CJM are close to retirement age already so they wont be able to become CJ when Fairuz retires. The PM also wont choose them 1 coz he wants a CJ that is his DOG. Remember Pengajian AM? Appointment of high position judges need persetujuan Majlis Raja-Raja. As a counter-move, the PM put Zaki in the Federal Court. If anything happens, Zaki can be the next CJ and our problems will continue for sure. Zaki isn't as clean as some think he is. check out this.
In my opinion, a Royal Commission should be set up to investigate our Judiciary, clean it up and revamp it to restore the public confidence.
Corrupt judiciary
more on the current judiciary crisis that is going on. i hate the fact that our press is not reporting much on this issue. it shows that our mainstream media cannot be depended upon to report on what is really going on.
THE TRANSCRIPT:
The CJ said he is relative to now Agong, so he wants to stay on to 68, so, Tengku Adnan, I told Tengku Adnan, yesterday I had a meeting with him.
He said PM is already very angry with him, he said no problem he is going to make you acting err.. confirm your position as PCA, working very hard then working very hard to get Tan Sri Mokhtar as CJM.
Ah, we just keep it confidential. I am working very hard on it. Then there is a letter, according to Tengku, I am going to see him tomorrow, there is a letter sent to CJ, I mean Tan Sri Dzaiddin, that Datuk Heliliah, Datuk Ramli, Datuk Ramli and Datuk Ma’roop be made judges, and he rejected Dr Andrew Chui and apa itu Zainuddin Ismail lah. Because Zainuddin Ismail condemned your appointment and Tan Sri Mokhtar’s appointment.
And then you also, you seems to wrote a letter for the remaining five be confirmed as judges. As per our memo I discuss with Tun Eusoff Chin and we sent the same memo to PM.
I just want to get a copy letter that that has been done.
And then Tan Sri Dzaiddin said he is going to recommend six people for the court of appeal, but until today the letter hasn’t come to PM. He never discuss, but neither he has sent the letter to PM. Yes he has not sent. I know it is under the constitution for judges all that is your job Datuk to send, but we don’t want to make it an issue now.
Ah. Ok Actually I told Tengku Adnan to inform PM, PM to call you for a meeting. I organize it so that Tengku Adnan will call you directly. And then I got your number, I will tell him to call you directly to for you to meet PM lah. So should be ok, then ar.. correct correct, it is very important that the key players must be there.
Correct x3. correct x2. You know that the same problem that Tun Eusoff Chin has. He tried to do all this and yet he has run out of soldiers. He couldn’t do it because many are from the other camp. Last time was unfortunate because Tun Daim was doing everything sabotaging, otherwise how are things with you - everything is ok?. No, don’t worry. You know sometimes Tan Sri Vincent that half the time they are talking about judiciary rather than doing the work. But if I don’t do this part my work will be useless.
Ha ha ha. Ah yes.Correct x5, right x3 correct. Ah right susah. You see he has now asked for six court of appeal judges, so that he can put his men before he retires.
Correct x3, ah and then ah, correct. But never-mind, I will do this, I will get Tengku Adnan to arrange for PM to call you and Tan Sri Vincent Tan for PM to call you. And you know why, actually, I am very grateful with Tan Sri Vincent Tan you know why, I brainwash you so much even I quarrel with him. One day I went to Vincent Tan house, I fire him at the night in his house. I said very hell if you don’t do this who will do it?
All these people Tun Eusoff Chin, Datuk Ahmad Fairuz, Tan Sri Zainon all fought for that. Then he called Tengku Adnan. Tengku Adnan he said, saya bukan Perdana Menteri Malaysia lah, you know. If the old man doesn’t want to listen to me, go to hell.
He quarreled with me. I said nevermind, nevermind, you talk to PM again tomorrow morning to put Datuk Ahmad Fairuz to CJM. So next day morning he went and he called me back 9.30 that he said PM has already agreed. So I said nevermind, we hope for the best. So I said no harm trying, the worst that it can happen is that you lose. Being the old man, he is 76 years old, he gets whispers everywhere, and then you don’t whisper, he get taken away by the other side. But, now PM is very alert because every time he gets letters from Tan Sri Dzaidin, he called Tengku Adnan, he said discuss with Vincent, come and discuss.
Yes yes, ya. Correct x2, ya, but you see although I know PM, I am a lawyer in practice my views are.. I go through them, I go through them lah. Ah x4.
And then Dzaidin will call them telling that you went saw PM and you make a big issue out of it. Oh ya, I think so, I think so.
Ok, fine x4 ok x4
Ah x2 correct x2. Now I heard Raja Aziz, Raja Aziz huh, two weeks ago spoke to my lawyer Thayalan, and another lawyer Ailan, in the high court, they have a case each other. So, Thayalan and Ailan asked Raja Aziz, how is Tan Sri Wan Adnan?
He said he is on his way down. But you know what is the shocking thing he said? Datuk Fairuz became CJM. He overruled everybody, and three months time, he is going be made PCA, and 6 months time he is going to be CJ. He said "i can't take this shock". He told us.
Ha, it seems that they are going to organize a campaign to run you down. But you just keep quiet don’t say anything. Even the press asked, you said I leave it to God, that’s all. Don’t say. I really like your message. You said you work very hard, what can I do? I leave it to God.
That’s the best answer datuk that you can ever give.
Ah… I will also get Tan Sri to remind PM to put the Tan Sri ship this year lah. This will elevate you, you know.
Oh yes x4. ha. XX got so fast, Tan Sri Chong waited for whole year to get Tan Sri ship.
Ah.. My god that’s why, ah. Correct x4, ya x4 right x3 correct x2
Don’t worry, we organize this. If Tan Sri Vincent and Tengku Adnan want to meet you privately, they will, I will call you. We organize in a private arrangement, in a very neutral place.
No don’t worry, Datuk, I know how much you suffered for Tun Eusoff Chin. And Tun said Datuk Ahmad Fairuz 110% loyalty. We want to make sure our friends are there for the sake of the PM and for the sake of the country.
Not for our own interest, not for our own interest. We want to make sure the country comes up well. Well, you suffered so much, so much you have done. For the election, Wee Choo Keong, everything. How much, no body would have done all these.
Yes, you know. Good lah. Don’t worry. I am constantly working on this.
Ya ya, don’t worry x2. We work hard on this. And Datuk, and then if Tan Sri Vincent and Tengku Adnan want to see you, I will organize it in such a confidential place.
Ok Datuk all the very best. God bless you and your family.
Ok. Thank you thank you. Bye.
THE TRANSCRIPT:
The CJ said he is relative to now Agong, so he wants to stay on to 68, so, Tengku Adnan, I told Tengku Adnan, yesterday I had a meeting with him.
He said PM is already very angry with him, he said no problem he is going to make you acting err.. confirm your position as PCA, working very hard then working very hard to get Tan Sri Mokhtar as CJM.
Ah, we just keep it confidential. I am working very hard on it. Then there is a letter, according to Tengku, I am going to see him tomorrow, there is a letter sent to CJ, I mean Tan Sri Dzaiddin, that Datuk Heliliah, Datuk Ramli, Datuk Ramli and Datuk Ma’roop be made judges, and he rejected Dr Andrew Chui and apa itu Zainuddin Ismail lah. Because Zainuddin Ismail condemned your appointment and Tan Sri Mokhtar’s appointment.
And then you also, you seems to wrote a letter for the remaining five be confirmed as judges. As per our memo I discuss with Tun Eusoff Chin and we sent the same memo to PM.
I just want to get a copy letter that that has been done.
And then Tan Sri Dzaiddin said he is going to recommend six people for the court of appeal, but until today the letter hasn’t come to PM. He never discuss, but neither he has sent the letter to PM. Yes he has not sent. I know it is under the constitution for judges all that is your job Datuk to send, but we don’t want to make it an issue now.
Ah. Ok Actually I told Tengku Adnan to inform PM, PM to call you for a meeting. I organize it so that Tengku Adnan will call you directly. And then I got your number, I will tell him to call you directly to for you to meet PM lah. So should be ok, then ar.. correct correct, it is very important that the key players must be there.
Correct x3. correct x2. You know that the same problem that Tun Eusoff Chin has. He tried to do all this and yet he has run out of soldiers. He couldn’t do it because many are from the other camp. Last time was unfortunate because Tun Daim was doing everything sabotaging, otherwise how are things with you - everything is ok?. No, don’t worry. You know sometimes Tan Sri Vincent that half the time they are talking about judiciary rather than doing the work. But if I don’t do this part my work will be useless.
Ha ha ha. Ah yes.Correct x5, right x3 correct. Ah right susah. You see he has now asked for six court of appeal judges, so that he can put his men before he retires.
Correct x3, ah and then ah, correct. But never-mind, I will do this, I will get Tengku Adnan to arrange for PM to call you and Tan Sri Vincent Tan for PM to call you. And you know why, actually, I am very grateful with Tan Sri Vincent Tan you know why, I brainwash you so much even I quarrel with him. One day I went to Vincent Tan house, I fire him at the night in his house. I said very hell if you don’t do this who will do it?
All these people Tun Eusoff Chin, Datuk Ahmad Fairuz, Tan Sri Zainon all fought for that. Then he called Tengku Adnan. Tengku Adnan he said, saya bukan Perdana Menteri Malaysia lah, you know. If the old man doesn’t want to listen to me, go to hell.
He quarreled with me. I said nevermind, nevermind, you talk to PM again tomorrow morning to put Datuk Ahmad Fairuz to CJM. So next day morning he went and he called me back 9.30 that he said PM has already agreed. So I said nevermind, we hope for the best. So I said no harm trying, the worst that it can happen is that you lose. Being the old man, he is 76 years old, he gets whispers everywhere, and then you don’t whisper, he get taken away by the other side. But, now PM is very alert because every time he gets letters from Tan Sri Dzaidin, he called Tengku Adnan, he said discuss with Vincent, come and discuss.
Yes yes, ya. Correct x2, ya, but you see although I know PM, I am a lawyer in practice my views are.. I go through them, I go through them lah. Ah x4.
And then Dzaidin will call them telling that you went saw PM and you make a big issue out of it. Oh ya, I think so, I think so.
Ok, fine x4 ok x4
Ah x2 correct x2. Now I heard Raja Aziz, Raja Aziz huh, two weeks ago spoke to my lawyer Thayalan, and another lawyer Ailan, in the high court, they have a case each other. So, Thayalan and Ailan asked Raja Aziz, how is Tan Sri Wan Adnan?
He said he is on his way down. But you know what is the shocking thing he said? Datuk Fairuz became CJM. He overruled everybody, and three months time, he is going be made PCA, and 6 months time he is going to be CJ. He said "i can't take this shock". He told us.
Ha, it seems that they are going to organize a campaign to run you down. But you just keep quiet don’t say anything. Even the press asked, you said I leave it to God, that’s all. Don’t say. I really like your message. You said you work very hard, what can I do? I leave it to God.
That’s the best answer datuk that you can ever give.
Ah… I will also get Tan Sri to remind PM to put the Tan Sri ship this year lah. This will elevate you, you know.
Oh yes x4. ha. XX got so fast, Tan Sri Chong waited for whole year to get Tan Sri ship.
Ah.. My god that’s why, ah. Correct x4, ya x4 right x3 correct x2
Don’t worry, we organize this. If Tan Sri Vincent and Tengku Adnan want to meet you privately, they will, I will call you. We organize in a private arrangement, in a very neutral place.
No don’t worry, Datuk, I know how much you suffered for Tun Eusoff Chin. And Tun said Datuk Ahmad Fairuz 110% loyalty. We want to make sure our friends are there for the sake of the PM and for the sake of the country.
Not for our own interest, not for our own interest. We want to make sure the country comes up well. Well, you suffered so much, so much you have done. For the election, Wee Choo Keong, everything. How much, no body would have done all these.
Yes, you know. Good lah. Don’t worry. I am constantly working on this.
Ya ya, don’t worry x2. We work hard on this. And Datuk, and then if Tan Sri Vincent and Tengku Adnan want to see you, I will organize it in such a confidential place.
Ok Datuk all the very best. God bless you and your family.
Ok. Thank you thank you. Bye.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
stupid and silly day
what a day it has been lah today. first of all, it was journalism paper. section A both questions no problem lah. section B was writing news which i am quite good at. the question was also quite easy. it wasn't a good thing thou. it made me over confident. when i finish writing the news i still have 20 mins like that. little did i know that i missed out an important point in the news..so dead lah..out of 50 marks duno can get 30 or not for section B..so fuk up lah..my A edi out of the window for this 1..hope for a miracle lah..argh..
b4 i got back home, had a meeting with dr carmen and the rest of the groupies. she told me she replied my post in the blog d and lend me 2 books. after that sent sharwin and ian to LRT station b4 i go back home to have a short rest. next programme is fishing with anthony at shah alam. b4 i go to the fishing part, some thing that really pissed me off happened. a coursemate of mine pandai pandai go simply comment on the blog without understanding the context of the conversation and even had the audacity to insult me. she's the one who alwiz accuse ppl of committing fallacy but now she committed a 2in1 fallacy. hebat kan. *tepuk tangan* was so pissed off that i almost used the f word but give face to dr carmen i din use it. what do u mean by ur earlier disclaimer stating no offence meant? anyone who kena alwiz will take offence la. u know what i think of that? shove it lah..
enuff of ranting d. lepas geram. after i lepas geram in the same blog she insulted me d, i straight went to shah alam to my next itenary which was fishing. a little jam lah on the way there but not long. fish and fish whole day din get anything, den ar suddenly oni we get 1 fish..a super huge keli..ok la there are bigger ones but this is the biggest that tony ever caught. it is bigger than my size 8 sandals. imagine that. later i put pictures of the fish. hehe. after that when we were keeping things, i accidentally hurt my thumb. poked by the mata kail. careless me. wasnt that painful la after the initial sting. after that tony brought me to a mamak in klang to eat sumthing coz i havent had my dinner. kinda expensive lah but dont care lah.
after makan i balik lor..from klang back to pj. the journey took me less than 15 minutes. was speeding all the way on federal highway doing 130-140 km/h..i was following a bmw 1 series and a toyota mrS i think..duno will kena saman or not..haha.
b4 i got back home, had a meeting with dr carmen and the rest of the groupies. she told me she replied my post in the blog d and lend me 2 books. after that sent sharwin and ian to LRT station b4 i go back home to have a short rest. next programme is fishing with anthony at shah alam. b4 i go to the fishing part, some thing that really pissed me off happened. a coursemate of mine pandai pandai go simply comment on the blog without understanding the context of the conversation and even had the audacity to insult me. she's the one who alwiz accuse ppl of committing fallacy but now she committed a 2in1 fallacy. hebat kan. *tepuk tangan* was so pissed off that i almost used the f word but give face to dr carmen i din use it. what do u mean by ur earlier disclaimer stating no offence meant? anyone who kena alwiz will take offence la. u know what i think of that? shove it lah..
enuff of ranting d. lepas geram. after i lepas geram in the same blog she insulted me d, i straight went to shah alam to my next itenary which was fishing. a little jam lah on the way there but not long. fish and fish whole day din get anything, den ar suddenly oni we get 1 fish..a super huge keli..ok la there are bigger ones but this is the biggest that tony ever caught. it is bigger than my size 8 sandals. imagine that. later i put pictures of the fish. hehe. after that when we were keeping things, i accidentally hurt my thumb. poked by the mata kail. careless me. wasnt that painful la after the initial sting. after that tony brought me to a mamak in klang to eat sumthing coz i havent had my dinner. kinda expensive lah but dont care lah.
after makan i balik lor..from klang back to pj. the journey took me less than 15 minutes. was speeding all the way on federal highway doing 130-140 km/h..i was following a bmw 1 series and a toyota mrS i think..duno will kena saman or not..haha.
the fish huge hor?
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Mourinho quits Chelsea
LONDON (AFP) - Jose Mourinho was only ever going to leave Chelsea one way and so it proved on Thursday morning as the Portuguese coach departed in a blaze of controversy.
Mourinho's brash personality ensured he quickly became the Premier League's most talked-about figure after his arrival three years ago.
At the press conference to announce his appointment at Chelsea, Mourinho insisted his impressive achievements at Porto meant he should be seen as 'a special one'.
That tongue in cheek comment set the tone for one of the most dramatic managerial reigns in the history of English football
In the space of three seasons, Mourinho ended Chelsea's 50-year wait for a league title, won it again 12 months later and added two League Cups and an FA Cup to the Stamford Bridge trophy room.
But it was his habit of causing controversy whenever he opened his mouth that made Mourinho such a fascinating figure and ultimately cost him his job after one-too-many disagreements with Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.
His fire and brimstone spell at Chelsea has its foundations in his burning desire to leave his mark on the sport.
Although Mourinho's father Felix had been a Portugal goalkeeper, Jose did not have enough talent to become a successful professional and that failure fuelled his fire when he became a coach.
He worked as an assistant at several small Portuguese clubs before landing a job translating for Porto and then Sporting Lisbon manager Bobby Robson.
He followed Robson to Barcelona and got his first break when Louis van Gaal took over and allowed Mourinho to take training sessions.
That was all the encouragement he needed. He was soon in charge at Benfica, but, in a sign of things to come, Mourinho's first managerial job came to a premature end after a run-in with an owner.
That exit left a bitter taste for Mourinho and he resolved to make the most of his next opportunity at a big club.
After taking unfashionable Uniao de Leiria to third in the Portuguese league, he took charge at Porto in January 2002. It was a move that would change his life.
Mourinho was a believer in a scientific approach to management and his rigorous training schedules were designed to make sure his players operated at their maximum.
Within a year he had transformed Porto into league champions. Not content with that he also won the UEFA Cup and Portuguese Cup.
But it was the following year that Mourinho really emerging kicking and screaming onto the global stage.
His manic celebratory run down the touchline at Old Trafford after Costinha's late goal had sent Porto through to the Champions League quarter-finals at Manchester United's expense was an unforgettable image.
Porto went on to win the Champions League with a crushing 3-0 defeat of Monaco. But Mourinho stole the spotlight by tearing off his medal and walking off the pitch without joining in his team's celebrations.
That was the last Porto would see of their talismanic leader and within weeks he was unveiled at Chelsea.
In the same way he had worked the oracle at Porto, Mourinho quickly changed Chelsea from a losing culture to a winning one.
They were Premier League champions and League Cup winners in 2005 and won the league again a year later. But the seeds of his departure were sown in the 2006 close season.
Mourinho wanted to sign the brilliant midfielder Kaka from AC Milan, but Abramovich instead presented him with Andriy Shevchenko, a friend of the Russian billionaire.
Abramovich believed he had provided Mourinho with enough money to produce the kind of fantasy football that made him fall in love with the game.
So when Shevchenko proved a flop, Abramovich demanded the appointment of Avram Grant to assist Mourinho in bringing the striker back to his best.
Mourinho refused and Abramovich responded by withdrawing transfer funds in January. The end was in sight.
The Portuguese had lost his support in the corridors of power and a lacklustre start to this season proved the final straw.
Mourinho will have few qualms about leaving Chelsea. His self-belief and record as a proven winner will ensure he has no shortage of suitors.
Wherever he turns up next, it is certain to be another rocky ride.
Mourinho's brash personality ensured he quickly became the Premier League's most talked-about figure after his arrival three years ago.
At the press conference to announce his appointment at Chelsea, Mourinho insisted his impressive achievements at Porto meant he should be seen as 'a special one'.
That tongue in cheek comment set the tone for one of the most dramatic managerial reigns in the history of English football
In the space of three seasons, Mourinho ended Chelsea's 50-year wait for a league title, won it again 12 months later and added two League Cups and an FA Cup to the Stamford Bridge trophy room.
But it was his habit of causing controversy whenever he opened his mouth that made Mourinho such a fascinating figure and ultimately cost him his job after one-too-many disagreements with Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.
His fire and brimstone spell at Chelsea has its foundations in his burning desire to leave his mark on the sport.
Although Mourinho's father Felix had been a Portugal goalkeeper, Jose did not have enough talent to become a successful professional and that failure fuelled his fire when he became a coach.
He worked as an assistant at several small Portuguese clubs before landing a job translating for Porto and then Sporting Lisbon manager Bobby Robson.
He followed Robson to Barcelona and got his first break when Louis van Gaal took over and allowed Mourinho to take training sessions.
That was all the encouragement he needed. He was soon in charge at Benfica, but, in a sign of things to come, Mourinho's first managerial job came to a premature end after a run-in with an owner.
That exit left a bitter taste for Mourinho and he resolved to make the most of his next opportunity at a big club.
After taking unfashionable Uniao de Leiria to third in the Portuguese league, he took charge at Porto in January 2002. It was a move that would change his life.
Mourinho was a believer in a scientific approach to management and his rigorous training schedules were designed to make sure his players operated at their maximum.
Within a year he had transformed Porto into league champions. Not content with that he also won the UEFA Cup and Portuguese Cup.
But it was the following year that Mourinho really emerging kicking and screaming onto the global stage.
His manic celebratory run down the touchline at Old Trafford after Costinha's late goal had sent Porto through to the Champions League quarter-finals at Manchester United's expense was an unforgettable image.
Porto went on to win the Champions League with a crushing 3-0 defeat of Monaco. But Mourinho stole the spotlight by tearing off his medal and walking off the pitch without joining in his team's celebrations.
That was the last Porto would see of their talismanic leader and within weeks he was unveiled at Chelsea.
In the same way he had worked the oracle at Porto, Mourinho quickly changed Chelsea from a losing culture to a winning one.
They were Premier League champions and League Cup winners in 2005 and won the league again a year later. But the seeds of his departure were sown in the 2006 close season.
Mourinho wanted to sign the brilliant midfielder Kaka from AC Milan, but Abramovich instead presented him with Andriy Shevchenko, a friend of the Russian billionaire.
Abramovich believed he had provided Mourinho with enough money to produce the kind of fantasy football that made him fall in love with the game.
So when Shevchenko proved a flop, Abramovich demanded the appointment of Avram Grant to assist Mourinho in bringing the striker back to his best.
Mourinho refused and Abramovich responded by withdrawing transfer funds in January. The end was in sight.
The Portuguese had lost his support in the corridors of power and a lacklustre start to this season proved the final straw.
Mourinho will have few qualms about leaving Chelsea. His self-belief and record as a proven winner will ensure he has no shortage of suitors.
Wherever he turns up next, it is certain to be another rocky ride.
Outrageous judiciary
our judiciary is totally hopeless. the latest news is of a lawyer brokering the appointment of judges. i think we should get rid of the Chief Judge and appoint a more credible person to it. our current Chief Judge is apparently a puppet to the Executive and thus making the Judiciary subservient to the Executive. thats a breach in the concept of separation of powers. everytime the government want to change the law to suit themselves, the Chief Judge will advocate the plan without hesitation. for example, the recent announcement that the govt wishes to do away with the English Common Law and replace it with the Islamic law. the Chief Judge quickly supported the decision. hei, i thought the Chief Judge's job is to protect the Constitution and interpret them. How come now the Chief judge is supporting the govt in tearing apart the Constitution?
ppl like Tun Salleh Abbas should be holding the Chief Judge position. a person who dares to stand up against the Excecutive.
here are some excerpt from Malaysia-Today:
Two names, Nik Hashim and Hashim Yusof, were given by the CJ, both whom are ‘kaki bodek’, as possible candidates to replace him. Both these candidates were rejected by the Rulers. After their elimination, as a consolation, they were promoted to the Appeals Court.
Since the Rulers had rejected Nik Hashim and Hashim Yusof, the next in line would be Justice Dato Abdul Hamid Mohamed and Justice Dato Alauddin Mohd. Sherif. But the CJ does not favour these two because they are independent-minded, apolitical and well-known for their integrity. The CJ bypassed these two on the pretext that both are close to retirement in a year or two.
On the Rulers’ insistence, the PM and the CJ had no choice but to accept Justice Hamid as President of the Court of Appeal and Justice Alauddin as the Chief Justice of Malaya. Both of them were appointed by the Agong on 5 September 2007.
On the same day of the above two appointments, a senior lawyer from the private sector, Tan Sri Zaki Tun Azmi, 62 years old, became the first person to be directly-appointed to the Federal Court. He is UMNO’s Legal Adviser and a member of its Disciplinary Committee plus is Fairuz’s ‘kaki’ from the Kedah days.
His leaving a lucrative private sector practice where he was making millions a month in legal fees -- repeat, millions a month -- raises questions in the minds of the members of the bench, the chattering class, and some important MPs on both sides of the political aisle. The speculation is that he could probably succeed Fairuz as CJ.
It is an open secret that the Prime Minister wanted a two year extension to Fairuz’s contract. But this was rejected by the Agong and his brother rulers. As a temporary arrangement, the PM asked the Agong to appoint Fairuz on a three-month contract. The Agong is still holding back his agreement on this matter.
This whole affair, yet again, shows the PM’s duplicity. Here is a God-given chance to do something about our Judiciary, which has been systematically destroyed over the last 25 years. Instead of doing something about it, which is what the people want, the PM is still trying to keep the rot afloat by working with Fairuz.
It is a shame that today our Rulers have to step in to defend the Constitution and rebuild our much-battered institutions. It is also a sad reflection of our UMNO-led governance. You have to expose this and do not worry about the authenticity of the information as my information is from impeccable sources. You will be doing Malaysians a great public service by exposing this latest Constitutional Crisis.
to know more click here.
ppl like Tun Salleh Abbas should be holding the Chief Judge position. a person who dares to stand up against the Excecutive.
here are some excerpt from Malaysia-Today:
Two names, Nik Hashim and Hashim Yusof, were given by the CJ, both whom are ‘kaki bodek’, as possible candidates to replace him. Both these candidates were rejected by the Rulers. After their elimination, as a consolation, they were promoted to the Appeals Court.
Since the Rulers had rejected Nik Hashim and Hashim Yusof, the next in line would be Justice Dato Abdul Hamid Mohamed and Justice Dato Alauddin Mohd. Sherif. But the CJ does not favour these two because they are independent-minded, apolitical and well-known for their integrity. The CJ bypassed these two on the pretext that both are close to retirement in a year or two.
On the Rulers’ insistence, the PM and the CJ had no choice but to accept Justice Hamid as President of the Court of Appeal and Justice Alauddin as the Chief Justice of Malaya. Both of them were appointed by the Agong on 5 September 2007.
On the same day of the above two appointments, a senior lawyer from the private sector, Tan Sri Zaki Tun Azmi, 62 years old, became the first person to be directly-appointed to the Federal Court. He is UMNO’s Legal Adviser and a member of its Disciplinary Committee plus is Fairuz’s ‘kaki’ from the Kedah days.
His leaving a lucrative private sector practice where he was making millions a month in legal fees -- repeat, millions a month -- raises questions in the minds of the members of the bench, the chattering class, and some important MPs on both sides of the political aisle. The speculation is that he could probably succeed Fairuz as CJ.
It is an open secret that the Prime Minister wanted a two year extension to Fairuz’s contract. But this was rejected by the Agong and his brother rulers. As a temporary arrangement, the PM asked the Agong to appoint Fairuz on a three-month contract. The Agong is still holding back his agreement on this matter.
This whole affair, yet again, shows the PM’s duplicity. Here is a God-given chance to do something about our Judiciary, which has been systematically destroyed over the last 25 years. Instead of doing something about it, which is what the people want, the PM is still trying to keep the rot afloat by working with Fairuz.
It is a shame that today our Rulers have to step in to defend the Constitution and rebuild our much-battered institutions. It is also a sad reflection of our UMNO-led governance. You have to expose this and do not worry about the authenticity of the information as my information is from impeccable sources. You will be doing Malaysians a great public service by exposing this latest Constitutional Crisis.
to know more click here.
Gang rape in JB
ppl nowadays ar. getting more gruesome.
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/9/20/nation/18939635&sec=nation
http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2007/9/20/nation/18939635&sec=nation
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Sensors: Banned Books & Other Monsters
Title : Sensors: Banned Books & Other Monsters
Venue : The Annexe @ Central Market
Jalan Hang Kasturi
Kuala Lumpur
URL : http://www.centralmarket-kl.com.my
Date & Time : Fri 21 Sep – Sun 7 Oct 2007 (Mon – Sat: 11am – 7pm; Sun: 11am – 5pm)
Tickets : Free Admission
Phone : 03-2274 6542/ 03-2070 1137
Synopsis : "Sensors" is an exhibition by artist Sharon Chin, that takes banned books as a motif, with the central idea being that the process of censorship is essentially arbitrary in nature.
A book may be banned in Malaysia according to detailed guidelines, but any attempt to objectively define these guidelines is difficult.
The 1500 or so banned titles (since 1971) only suggest, not define, what is deemed forbidden, transgressive or offensive in our society. Thinking about censorship draws for us merely shadowy shapes of our fears, which disappear like wraiths when exposed in the light of knowledge and discourse.
"Sensors" comprises an installation in two parts, housed in two adjacent gallery spaces. The first consists of a buzz wire game where several buzz wires stretch along the length of the gallery. The shape of the wire follows a histogram chart of categories of books that have been banned in Malaysia from 1971 to the present day. The viewer is invited to play with the buzz wire, and each time the hoop touches the wire, a warning light goes off. In this way, information about banned books becomes a spatial entity negotiated physically by the audience.
The second installation is in the adjacent space, which is blacked out. Viewers are provided with handheld torches to navigate the work which consists of several ‘doors’ hanging in space. The viewers open the ‘doors’ to discover monsters and mythical creatures that have been painted on lists of banned books. They may examine these works only by the dim light of the torch. The secret, irrational atmosphere of this installation is in contrast with that of the other space, which is ostensibly characterized by objectivity, empiricism and rationality.
Rather than lament the lack of access to banned materials, this exhibition seeks to explore censorship as a paradoxical and complex process.
Sharon Chin was born in KL in 1980 and furthered her studies in New Zealand and Australia (Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, 2001; BFA, Victorian College of the Arts, 2003). Working with text and sculpture, especially in site-specific installations, her work looks at how we negotiate geography, history, human relations and language in the contemporary imagination.
Her most recent body of work, "Fourth World", was shown at the Australian High Commission in Kuala Lumpur in 2006. She also writes regularly on art for various local publications, including The Star, Kakiseni and Off The Edge.
The completion of this project was made possible with the generous support of a grant from the inaugural Krishen Jit Astro Fund.
My lecturer got ask a few of my classmates to go but she din ask me coz she know i wont go one on 27th Sept. She knows I'm goin back either on 25/26 ma but i so wanted to go have a look at these books. too bad no money to buy. maybe i should go on my own and have a look. duno how now la..should i or shouldn't i go.. dilemma !
Oral Comm and McD
do you see any connection between oral communication and McD? no rite? guessed so, neither do i coz there isn't one. haha.
well, today is the 4th paper, oral communication and interpersonal skills. i believe i did quite well in the paper. can get B+ or A- lah..give me 15 more minutes i can get A d. this time i really dont have enough time to write. was scampering all the way. but anyway was quite satisfied overall.
so i decided to reward myself with a luxurious lunch. well to some it might not be but to me it is coz its rm8+. it's McD! u think its cheap ar? pamper myself once in awhile nvm la. but have to save on meals for 2 days now to keep my spending in control.
we sat in McD and chatted for hours lah as if there's no more paper. we do have journalism paper on friday but nobody seems to care. i for one surely didn't care coz its not my style to study early anyway. i'm rite now bloggin here and not studyin. haha.
dr carmen will lend me a few books for the coming holidays. haaa no need spend money but got books to read. i'm so smart rite. hehehe
well, today is the 4th paper, oral communication and interpersonal skills. i believe i did quite well in the paper. can get B+ or A- lah..give me 15 more minutes i can get A d. this time i really dont have enough time to write. was scampering all the way. but anyway was quite satisfied overall.
so i decided to reward myself with a luxurious lunch. well to some it might not be but to me it is coz its rm8+. it's McD! u think its cheap ar? pamper myself once in awhile nvm la. but have to save on meals for 2 days now to keep my spending in control.
we sat in McD and chatted for hours lah as if there's no more paper. we do have journalism paper on friday but nobody seems to care. i for one surely didn't care coz its not my style to study early anyway. i'm rite now bloggin here and not studyin. haha.
dr carmen will lend me a few books for the coming holidays. haaa no need spend money but got books to read. i'm so smart rite. hehehe
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
10 Tahun Sebelum Merdeka - KL Encore
for info: http://10tahun.blogspot.com/2007/09/tayangan-semula-sepuluh-tahun-sebelum.html
free entry. also visit here
free entry. also visit here
Monday, September 17, 2007
Perverted idea
super dumb and super funny blog post..dont read if u cannot handle anything with sexual connotations..
http://xiaxue.blogspot.com/2004/11/phone-sex.html
dont like my blog? then dont read la.. :p
http://xiaxue.blogspot.com/2004/11/phone-sex.html
dont like my blog? then dont read la.. :p
Colin McRae killed in helicopter crash
LONDON (AP) - Colin McRae, whose fascination with cars grew into an obsession that led him to 25 wins in a World Rally Championship career, was killed in a helicopter crash along with his 5-year-old son and two others, police said Sunday. He was 39.
McRae was piloting the helicopter, which he owned and was licensed to fly, when it crashed Saturday in a wooded area near his home.
McRae raced in the World Rally Championship from 1987 until 2004, becoming champion in 1995. He also took part in the Paris to Dakar rally, the Le Mans 24 hour race, the Race of Champions and the X Games.
McRae also lent his name to a best-selling computer game, but it was his flamboyant racing style that earned fans in all types of motorsport and lifted the profile of rallying in Britain.
"He was really daring, always pushing it further," Formula One driver Heikki Kovalainen said. "I always liked his attitude. It was maximum attack always and he had some big rolls sometimes. Every time he had one, though it was like: 'Oh well, it's just a roll,' and he just carried on."
Two other people also died in the crash - 6-year-old Ben Porcelli and 37-year-old Graeme Duncan. The aircraft was badly burned, making it impossible for police to immediately identify the occupants.
The son of five-time British rally champion Jimmy McRae, Colin McRae was competing on motorbikes by age 7. He competed in his first rally in 1985, but qualified as a plumber while he built his racing career, which kicked off when he became the British rally champion in 1991 and 1992.
"There was never a minute when he didn't try 100 percent and, of course, we had lots of accidents," said David Richards, who owned the Prodrive team that McRae raced with when he won his world title. "And it is with great irony that, with all the accidents he had in rally cars that he walked away from unscathed, this happens in a helicopter."
He lifted the world title in 1995, and was runner-up in 1996, 1997 and 2001. He won 25 races in a World Rally Championship career that ran from 1987 to 2004. He made intermittent appearances on the WRC circuit until 2006.
"I didn't set goals as I went along," McRae told Autosport Magazine in January. "I just wanted to be quick as possible and win as much as possible."
McRae spent 2006 working on an auto camp in Are, Sweden, which he wanted to become the world's premier driving center. He also took part in a rally contest at the X Games over the past two years, including last month's event in Carson, Calif.
In the 2006 event, McRae flipped his Subaru, tearing a wheel off the car but still finished second.
McRae's success on the rally circuit led to a computer game "Colin McRae Rally," first released in 1998, which is now found on PlayStation, Game Boy, Xbox and PSP platforms.
McRae received an MBE award in 1996 from Queen Elizabeth II. He was married and also has a daughter.
McRae was piloting the helicopter, which he owned and was licensed to fly, when it crashed Saturday in a wooded area near his home.
McRae raced in the World Rally Championship from 1987 until 2004, becoming champion in 1995. He also took part in the Paris to Dakar rally, the Le Mans 24 hour race, the Race of Champions and the X Games.
McRae also lent his name to a best-selling computer game, but it was his flamboyant racing style that earned fans in all types of motorsport and lifted the profile of rallying in Britain.
"He was really daring, always pushing it further," Formula One driver Heikki Kovalainen said. "I always liked his attitude. It was maximum attack always and he had some big rolls sometimes. Every time he had one, though it was like: 'Oh well, it's just a roll,' and he just carried on."
Two other people also died in the crash - 6-year-old Ben Porcelli and 37-year-old Graeme Duncan. The aircraft was badly burned, making it impossible for police to immediately identify the occupants.
The son of five-time British rally champion Jimmy McRae, Colin McRae was competing on motorbikes by age 7. He competed in his first rally in 1985, but qualified as a plumber while he built his racing career, which kicked off when he became the British rally champion in 1991 and 1992.
"There was never a minute when he didn't try 100 percent and, of course, we had lots of accidents," said David Richards, who owned the Prodrive team that McRae raced with when he won his world title. "And it is with great irony that, with all the accidents he had in rally cars that he walked away from unscathed, this happens in a helicopter."
He lifted the world title in 1995, and was runner-up in 1996, 1997 and 2001. He won 25 races in a World Rally Championship career that ran from 1987 to 2004. He made intermittent appearances on the WRC circuit until 2006.
"I didn't set goals as I went along," McRae told Autosport Magazine in January. "I just wanted to be quick as possible and win as much as possible."
McRae spent 2006 working on an auto camp in Are, Sweden, which he wanted to become the world's premier driving center. He also took part in a rally contest at the X Games over the past two years, including last month's event in Carson, Calif.
In the 2006 event, McRae flipped his Subaru, tearing a wheel off the car but still finished second.
McRae's success on the rally circuit led to a computer game "Colin McRae Rally," first released in 1998, which is now found on PlayStation, Game Boy, Xbox and PSP platforms.
McRae received an MBE award in 1996 from Queen Elizabeth II. He was married and also has a daughter.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Love?
are you in love right now? if you think you are not in love now, and you don’t have anyone to love, if that’s what you think, then close your eyes. who do you see in your mind? yes, that person you see right now, you are already in love with that person. yes, your love has already begun.
“je t’aime beaucoup!” do you hear me?
“je t’aime beaucoup!” do you hear me?
courtesy of wahlui
Saturday, September 15, 2007
hands on skin
http://i-am-notty-and-nice.blogspot.com/2007/09/hands-on-skinexcited.html
hey u all must read this..good la the comments. some are true also.
hey u all must read this..good la the comments. some are true also.
Atheist with Attitude
Atheists with Attitude
Why do they hate Him?
by Anthony Gottlieb [reproduced without permission from NewYorker.com, September 15, 2007]
Great portents and disasters turn some minds to God and others away from him. When an unusually bright and long-tailed comet was tracked through the sky in the last two months of 1680, posters and sermons called on Christians to repent. A hen in Rome seemed to confirm that the Day of Judgment was near. On December 2nd, it made an extraordinarily loud cackle and produced an exceptionally large egg, on which could be seen a likeness of the comet, or so it was said. This added to the religious panic. But the comet also sparked a small triumph for rationalism. In the next few years, as Armageddon somehow failed to arrive, a stream of pamphlets across Europe and America argued that heavenly displays were purely natural phenomena. The skeptics won the day. From the eighteenth century onward, no respectable intellectual saw comets as direct messages from God—though there were still some fears that one might eventually hit the earth.
The felling of the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001, brought its share of religion. Two populist preachers, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, called it divine punishment (though both quickly withdrew their remarks), and not only the bereaved prayed for help. But September 11th and its aftershocks in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere are more notable for causing an outbreak of militant atheism, at least on bookshelves. The terrorist attacks were carried out in the name of Islam, and they have been taken, by a string of best-selling books, to illustrate the fatal dangers of all religious faith.
The first of these books was “The End of Faith,” by Sam Harris, which was published in 2004 and was on the Times paperback best-seller list for thirty-three weeks. Then came “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, who has written popular books on the science of consciousness and on Darwin. Next was “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and Britain’s preëminent science writer. Harris joined battle again last year with “Letter to a Christian Nation,” which renewed his attack on Christianity in particular. And now there is “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (Twelve; $24.99), by Christopher Hitchens, which is both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot. Hitchens is a British-born writer who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate. He thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it. These gifts are amply reflected in “God Is Not Great.”
Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”
It’s possible to wonder, indeed, where plain speaking ends and misanthropy begins: Hitchens says that the earth sometimes seems to him to be “a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.” He certainly likes to adopt the tone of a bemused Martian envoy hammering out a report for headquarters. (We hear of “a showbiz woman bizarrely known as Madonna.”) In a curious rhetorical tic, Hitchens regularly refers to people whom he wishes to ridicule by their zoological class. Thus the followers of Muhammad are “mammals,” as is the prophet himself, and so are the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi and St. Francis of Assisi; Japan’s wartime Emperor Hirohito is a “ridiculously overrated mammal,” and Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea’s current dictator, is a “ludicrous mammal.” Hitchens is trying to say that these people are mere fallible mortals; but his way of saying it makes him come across as rather an odd fish.
He is also a fallible one. After rightly railing against female genital mutilation in Africa, which is an indigenous cultural practice with no very firm ties to any particular religion, Hitchens lunges at male circumcision. He claims that it is a medically dangerous procedure that has made countless lives miserable. This will come as news to the Jewish community, where male circumcision is universal, and where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown. Jews, Muslims, and others among the nearly one-third of the world’s male population who have been circumcised may be reassured by the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it recommends male circumcision as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS.
Hitchens is on firmer ground as he traipses around the world on a tour of sectarian conflicts. He recounts how, a week before September 11th, a hypothetical question was put to him by Dennis Prager, an American talk-show host. Hitchens was asked to imagine himself in a foreign city at dusk, with a large group of men coming toward him. Would he feel safer, or less safe, if he were to learn that they were coming from a prayer meeting? With justified relish, the widely travelled Hitchens responds that he has had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad, and that, in each case, the answer would be a resounding “less safe.” He relates what he has seen or knows of warring factions of Protestants and Catholics in Ulster; Christians and Muslims in Beirut and in Bethlehem; Hindus and Muslims in Bombay; Roman Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbians, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; and Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians in Baghdad. In these cases and others, he argues, religion has exacerbated ethnic conflicts. As he puts it, “religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.”
That’s more plausible than what Sam Harris has to say on the subject. He maintains that religious belief not only aggravates such conflicts but is “the explicit cause” of them. He believes this even of Northern Ireland, where the Troubles between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Republicans began around 1610, when Britain confiscated Irish land and settled English and Scottish planters on it. As far as Harris is concerned, Islam brought down the Twin Towers, thanks in no small part to the incendiary language of the Koran; Middle East politics, history, and economics are irrelevant sideshows. This thesis suffers from a problem of timing: if he is right, why did Al Qaeda not arise, say, three hundred years ago, when the Koran said exactly what it says now?
One practical problem for antireligious writers is the diversity of religious views. However carefully a skeptic frames his attacks, he will be told that what people in fact believe is something different. For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.
So how is a would-be iconoclast supposed to tell exactly what the faithful believe? Interpreting the nature and prevalence of religious opinions is tricky, particularly if you depend on polls. Respondents can be lacking in seriousness, unsure what they believe, and evasive. Spiritual values and practices are what pollsters call “motherhood” issues: everybody knows that he is supposed to be in favor of them. Thus sociologists estimate that maybe only half of the Americans who say that they regularly attend church actually do so. The World Values Survey Association, an international network of social scientists, conducts research in eighty countries, and not long ago asked a large sample of the earth’s population to say which of four alternatives came closest to their own beliefs: a personal God (forty-two per cent chose this), a spirit or life force (thirty-four per cent), neither of these (ten per cent), don’t know (fourteen per cent). Depending on what the respondents understood by a “spirit or life force,” belief in God may be far less widespread than simple yes/no polls suggest.
In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps. He also worries about a poll that said that nearly three-quarters of Americans believe in angels—by which, to judge from blogs and online forums on the subject, some of them may have meant streaks of luck, or their own delightful infants.
The Bible is a motherhood issue, too. Harris takes at face value a Gallup poll suggesting that eighty-three per cent of Americans regard it as the Word of God, and he, like Dawkins and Hitchens, uses up plenty of ink establishing the wickedness of many tales in the Old Testament. Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.
The tangled diversity of faith is, in the event, no obstacle for Hitchens. He knows exactly which varieties of religion need attacking; namely, the whole lot. And if he has left anyone out he would probably like to hear about it so that he can rectify the omission. From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity; those who would apologize for any of its forms—Harris and Dawkins, in particular, insist on this point—are helping to sustain the whole. But, though the vague belief in a “life force” may be misguided, it’s hard to make the case that it’s dangerous. And there’s a dreamy incoherence in their conviction that moderate forms of religion somehow enable fundamentalist zeal and violence to survive. Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan by weakening the plush-toy creed of a nondenominational church in Chappaqua? If there were no religion, it’s true, neither house of worship would exist. So perhaps we are just being asked to sway along with John Lennon’s “Imagine.” (“Imagine there’s no countries /It isn’t hard to do /Nothing to kill or die for /And no religion too.”)
When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided. He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it. He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions. In “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,” Jonathan Glover, who is the director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College London, documents such opposition, and writes, “It is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have . . . come from principled religious commitment.” The loss of such commitment, Glover suggests, should be of concern even to nonbelievers. Still, Hitchens succeeds in compiling a list of evils that the faithful, too, should find sobering. Now that so much charitable work is carried out by secular bodies, religious ones have to work harder to keep the moral high ground. For the Catholic Church in particular—with its opposition to contraception, including the distribution of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, and the covering up of child abuse by priests—the ledger is not looking good.
Bertrand Russell, who had a prodigious knowledge of history and a crisp wit, claimed in 1930 that he could think of only two useful contributions that religion had made to civilization. It had helped fix the calendar, and it had made Egyptian priests observe eclipses carefully enough to predict them. He could at least have added Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and more than a few paintings; but perhaps the legacy of religion is too large a conundrum to be argued either way. The history of the West has been so closely interwoven with the history of religious institutions and ideas that it is hard to be confident about what life would have been like without them. One of Kingsley Amis’s lesser-known novels, “The Alteration,” tried to envisage an alternative course for modern history in which the Reformation never happened, science is a dirty word, and in 1976 most of the planet is ruled by a Machiavellian Pope from Yorkshire. In this world, Jean-Paul Sartre is a Jesuit and the central mosaic in Britain’s main cathedral is by David Hockney. That piece of fancy is dizzying enough on its own. But imagine attempting such a thought experiment in the contrary fashion, and rolling it back several thousand years to reveal a world with no churches, mosques, or temples. The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take. For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief.
In the early days of the Christian era, nobody was fantasizing about a world with no religion, but there were certainly those who liked to imagine a world with no Christians. The first surviving example of anti-Christian polemic is strikingly similar in tone to that of some of today’s militant atheists. In the second century, it was Christians who were called “atheists,” because they failed to worship the accepted gods. “On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians” was written in 178 A.D. by Celsus, an eclectic follower of Plato. The Christian deity, Celsus proclaimed, is a contradictory invention. He “keeps his purposes to himself for ages, and watches with indifference as wickedness triumphs over good,” and only after a long time decides to intervene and send his son: “Did he not care before?” Moses is said to be “stupid”; his books, and those of the prophets, are “garbage.” Christians have “concocted an absolutely offensive doctrine of everlasting punishment.” Their injunction to turn the other cheek was put much better by Socrates. And their talk of a Last Judgment is “complete nonsense.”
There’s not much more where that came from, because within a couple of hundred years Christians became the ones to decide who counted as an atheist and was to be punished accordingly. Pagan anti-Christian writings were destroyed wherever possible. In truth, from the start of the Christian era until the eighteenth century, there were probably very few people in the West who thought that there was no God of any sort. Those thinkers who had serious doubts about the traditional conception of God—of whom there were many in the seventeenth century—substituted another sort of deity, usually a more distant or less personalized one.
Even Voltaire, one of the fiercest critics of superstition, Christianity, and the Church’s abuse of power, was a man of deep religious feeling. His God, though, was beyond human understanding and had no concern for man. (Voltaire’s satirical tale “Candide,” which attacks the idea that all is for the best in a world closely watched over by a benevolent God, was partly inspired by a huge earthquake in Lisbon, which struck while the faithful were at Mass on All Saints’ Day in 1755 and killed perhaps thirty thousand people.)
Voltaire, like many others before and after him, was awed by the order and the beauty of the universe, which he thought pointed to a supreme designer, just as a watch points to a watchmaker. In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn’t have been more different from today’s militant atheists.
In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable.
Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.
In Paris, meanwhile, a number of thinkers began to profess atheism openly. They were the first influential group to do so, and included Denis Diderot, the co-editor of the Enlightenment’s great Encyclopédie, and Baron D’Holbach, who hosted a salon of freethinkers. Hume visited them, and made several friends there; they presented him with a large gold medal. But the philosophes were too dogmatic for Hume’s taste. To Hume’s like-minded friend the historian Edward Gibbon, they suffered from “intolerant zeal.” Still, they represented a historical vanguard: explicit attacks on religion as a whole poured forth within the next hundred years.
Since all the arguments against belief have been widely publicized for a long time, today’s militant atheists must sometimes wonder why religion persists. Hitchens says that it is born of fear and probably ineradicable. Harris holds that there are genuine spiritual experiences; having kicked sand in the faces of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he dives headlong into the surf of Eastern spirituality, encouraging readers to try Buddhist techniques of meditation instead of dangerous creeds. Dawkins devotes a chapter, and Dennett most of his book, to evolutionary accounts of how religion may have arisen and how its ideas spread. It’s thin stuff, and Dennett stresses that these are early days for a biological account of religion. It may, however, be too late for one. If a propensity toward religious belief is “hard-wired” in the brain, as it is sometimes said to be, the wiring has evidently become frayed. This is especially true in rich countries, nearly all of which—Ireland and America are exceptions—have relatively high rates of unbelief.
After making allowances for countries that have, or recently have had, an officially imposed atheist ideology, in which there might be some social pressure to deny belief in God, one can venture conservative estimates of the number of unbelievers in the world today. Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam’s—let alone as long as Christianity’s? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be.
Why do they hate Him?
by Anthony Gottlieb [reproduced without permission from NewYorker.com, September 15, 2007]
Great portents and disasters turn some minds to God and others away from him. When an unusually bright and long-tailed comet was tracked through the sky in the last two months of 1680, posters and sermons called on Christians to repent. A hen in Rome seemed to confirm that the Day of Judgment was near. On December 2nd, it made an extraordinarily loud cackle and produced an exceptionally large egg, on which could be seen a likeness of the comet, or so it was said. This added to the religious panic. But the comet also sparked a small triumph for rationalism. In the next few years, as Armageddon somehow failed to arrive, a stream of pamphlets across Europe and America argued that heavenly displays were purely natural phenomena. The skeptics won the day. From the eighteenth century onward, no respectable intellectual saw comets as direct messages from God—though there were still some fears that one might eventually hit the earth.
The felling of the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001, brought its share of religion. Two populist preachers, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, called it divine punishment (though both quickly withdrew their remarks), and not only the bereaved prayed for help. But September 11th and its aftershocks in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere are more notable for causing an outbreak of militant atheism, at least on bookshelves. The terrorist attacks were carried out in the name of Islam, and they have been taken, by a string of best-selling books, to illustrate the fatal dangers of all religious faith.
The first of these books was “The End of Faith,” by Sam Harris, which was published in 2004 and was on the Times paperback best-seller list for thirty-three weeks. Then came “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, who has written popular books on the science of consciousness and on Darwin. Next was “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and Britain’s preëminent science writer. Harris joined battle again last year with “Letter to a Christian Nation,” which renewed his attack on Christianity in particular. And now there is “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (Twelve; $24.99), by Christopher Hitchens, which is both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot. Hitchens is a British-born writer who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate. He thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it. These gifts are amply reflected in “God Is Not Great.”
Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”
It’s possible to wonder, indeed, where plain speaking ends and misanthropy begins: Hitchens says that the earth sometimes seems to him to be “a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.” He certainly likes to adopt the tone of a bemused Martian envoy hammering out a report for headquarters. (We hear of “a showbiz woman bizarrely known as Madonna.”) In a curious rhetorical tic, Hitchens regularly refers to people whom he wishes to ridicule by their zoological class. Thus the followers of Muhammad are “mammals,” as is the prophet himself, and so are the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi and St. Francis of Assisi; Japan’s wartime Emperor Hirohito is a “ridiculously overrated mammal,” and Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea’s current dictator, is a “ludicrous mammal.” Hitchens is trying to say that these people are mere fallible mortals; but his way of saying it makes him come across as rather an odd fish.
He is also a fallible one. After rightly railing against female genital mutilation in Africa, which is an indigenous cultural practice with no very firm ties to any particular religion, Hitchens lunges at male circumcision. He claims that it is a medically dangerous procedure that has made countless lives miserable. This will come as news to the Jewish community, where male circumcision is universal, and where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown. Jews, Muslims, and others among the nearly one-third of the world’s male population who have been circumcised may be reassured by the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it recommends male circumcision as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS.
Hitchens is on firmer ground as he traipses around the world on a tour of sectarian conflicts. He recounts how, a week before September 11th, a hypothetical question was put to him by Dennis Prager, an American talk-show host. Hitchens was asked to imagine himself in a foreign city at dusk, with a large group of men coming toward him. Would he feel safer, or less safe, if he were to learn that they were coming from a prayer meeting? With justified relish, the widely travelled Hitchens responds that he has had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad, and that, in each case, the answer would be a resounding “less safe.” He relates what he has seen or knows of warring factions of Protestants and Catholics in Ulster; Christians and Muslims in Beirut and in Bethlehem; Hindus and Muslims in Bombay; Roman Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbians, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; and Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians in Baghdad. In these cases and others, he argues, religion has exacerbated ethnic conflicts. As he puts it, “religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.”
That’s more plausible than what Sam Harris has to say on the subject. He maintains that religious belief not only aggravates such conflicts but is “the explicit cause” of them. He believes this even of Northern Ireland, where the Troubles between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Republicans began around 1610, when Britain confiscated Irish land and settled English and Scottish planters on it. As far as Harris is concerned, Islam brought down the Twin Towers, thanks in no small part to the incendiary language of the Koran; Middle East politics, history, and economics are irrelevant sideshows. This thesis suffers from a problem of timing: if he is right, why did Al Qaeda not arise, say, three hundred years ago, when the Koran said exactly what it says now?
One practical problem for antireligious writers is the diversity of religious views. However carefully a skeptic frames his attacks, he will be told that what people in fact believe is something different. For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.
So how is a would-be iconoclast supposed to tell exactly what the faithful believe? Interpreting the nature and prevalence of religious opinions is tricky, particularly if you depend on polls. Respondents can be lacking in seriousness, unsure what they believe, and evasive. Spiritual values and practices are what pollsters call “motherhood” issues: everybody knows that he is supposed to be in favor of them. Thus sociologists estimate that maybe only half of the Americans who say that they regularly attend church actually do so. The World Values Survey Association, an international network of social scientists, conducts research in eighty countries, and not long ago asked a large sample of the earth’s population to say which of four alternatives came closest to their own beliefs: a personal God (forty-two per cent chose this), a spirit or life force (thirty-four per cent), neither of these (ten per cent), don’t know (fourteen per cent). Depending on what the respondents understood by a “spirit or life force,” belief in God may be far less widespread than simple yes/no polls suggest.
In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps. He also worries about a poll that said that nearly three-quarters of Americans believe in angels—by which, to judge from blogs and online forums on the subject, some of them may have meant streaks of luck, or their own delightful infants.
The Bible is a motherhood issue, too. Harris takes at face value a Gallup poll suggesting that eighty-three per cent of Americans regard it as the Word of God, and he, like Dawkins and Hitchens, uses up plenty of ink establishing the wickedness of many tales in the Old Testament. Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.
The tangled diversity of faith is, in the event, no obstacle for Hitchens. He knows exactly which varieties of religion need attacking; namely, the whole lot. And if he has left anyone out he would probably like to hear about it so that he can rectify the omission. From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity; those who would apologize for any of its forms—Harris and Dawkins, in particular, insist on this point—are helping to sustain the whole. But, though the vague belief in a “life force” may be misguided, it’s hard to make the case that it’s dangerous. And there’s a dreamy incoherence in their conviction that moderate forms of religion somehow enable fundamentalist zeal and violence to survive. Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan by weakening the plush-toy creed of a nondenominational church in Chappaqua? If there were no religion, it’s true, neither house of worship would exist. So perhaps we are just being asked to sway along with John Lennon’s “Imagine.” (“Imagine there’s no countries /It isn’t hard to do /Nothing to kill or die for /And no religion too.”)
When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided. He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it. He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions. In “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,” Jonathan Glover, who is the director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College London, documents such opposition, and writes, “It is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have . . . come from principled religious commitment.” The loss of such commitment, Glover suggests, should be of concern even to nonbelievers. Still, Hitchens succeeds in compiling a list of evils that the faithful, too, should find sobering. Now that so much charitable work is carried out by secular bodies, religious ones have to work harder to keep the moral high ground. For the Catholic Church in particular—with its opposition to contraception, including the distribution of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, and the covering up of child abuse by priests—the ledger is not looking good.
Bertrand Russell, who had a prodigious knowledge of history and a crisp wit, claimed in 1930 that he could think of only two useful contributions that religion had made to civilization. It had helped fix the calendar, and it had made Egyptian priests observe eclipses carefully enough to predict them. He could at least have added Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and more than a few paintings; but perhaps the legacy of religion is too large a conundrum to be argued either way. The history of the West has been so closely interwoven with the history of religious institutions and ideas that it is hard to be confident about what life would have been like without them. One of Kingsley Amis’s lesser-known novels, “The Alteration,” tried to envisage an alternative course for modern history in which the Reformation never happened, science is a dirty word, and in 1976 most of the planet is ruled by a Machiavellian Pope from Yorkshire. In this world, Jean-Paul Sartre is a Jesuit and the central mosaic in Britain’s main cathedral is by David Hockney. That piece of fancy is dizzying enough on its own. But imagine attempting such a thought experiment in the contrary fashion, and rolling it back several thousand years to reveal a world with no churches, mosques, or temples. The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take. For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief.
In the early days of the Christian era, nobody was fantasizing about a world with no religion, but there were certainly those who liked to imagine a world with no Christians. The first surviving example of anti-Christian polemic is strikingly similar in tone to that of some of today’s militant atheists. In the second century, it was Christians who were called “atheists,” because they failed to worship the accepted gods. “On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians” was written in 178 A.D. by Celsus, an eclectic follower of Plato. The Christian deity, Celsus proclaimed, is a contradictory invention. He “keeps his purposes to himself for ages, and watches with indifference as wickedness triumphs over good,” and only after a long time decides to intervene and send his son: “Did he not care before?” Moses is said to be “stupid”; his books, and those of the prophets, are “garbage.” Christians have “concocted an absolutely offensive doctrine of everlasting punishment.” Their injunction to turn the other cheek was put much better by Socrates. And their talk of a Last Judgment is “complete nonsense.”
There’s not much more where that came from, because within a couple of hundred years Christians became the ones to decide who counted as an atheist and was to be punished accordingly. Pagan anti-Christian writings were destroyed wherever possible. In truth, from the start of the Christian era until the eighteenth century, there were probably very few people in the West who thought that there was no God of any sort. Those thinkers who had serious doubts about the traditional conception of God—of whom there were many in the seventeenth century—substituted another sort of deity, usually a more distant or less personalized one.
Even Voltaire, one of the fiercest critics of superstition, Christianity, and the Church’s abuse of power, was a man of deep religious feeling. His God, though, was beyond human understanding and had no concern for man. (Voltaire’s satirical tale “Candide,” which attacks the idea that all is for the best in a world closely watched over by a benevolent God, was partly inspired by a huge earthquake in Lisbon, which struck while the faithful were at Mass on All Saints’ Day in 1755 and killed perhaps thirty thousand people.)
Voltaire, like many others before and after him, was awed by the order and the beauty of the universe, which he thought pointed to a supreme designer, just as a watch points to a watchmaker. In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn’t have been more different from today’s militant atheists.
In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable.
Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.
In Paris, meanwhile, a number of thinkers began to profess atheism openly. They were the first influential group to do so, and included Denis Diderot, the co-editor of the Enlightenment’s great Encyclopédie, and Baron D’Holbach, who hosted a salon of freethinkers. Hume visited them, and made several friends there; they presented him with a large gold medal. But the philosophes were too dogmatic for Hume’s taste. To Hume’s like-minded friend the historian Edward Gibbon, they suffered from “intolerant zeal.” Still, they represented a historical vanguard: explicit attacks on religion as a whole poured forth within the next hundred years.
Since all the arguments against belief have been widely publicized for a long time, today’s militant atheists must sometimes wonder why religion persists. Hitchens says that it is born of fear and probably ineradicable. Harris holds that there are genuine spiritual experiences; having kicked sand in the faces of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he dives headlong into the surf of Eastern spirituality, encouraging readers to try Buddhist techniques of meditation instead of dangerous creeds. Dawkins devotes a chapter, and Dennett most of his book, to evolutionary accounts of how religion may have arisen and how its ideas spread. It’s thin stuff, and Dennett stresses that these are early days for a biological account of religion. It may, however, be too late for one. If a propensity toward religious belief is “hard-wired” in the brain, as it is sometimes said to be, the wiring has evidently become frayed. This is especially true in rich countries, nearly all of which—Ireland and America are exceptions—have relatively high rates of unbelief.
After making allowances for countries that have, or recently have had, an officially imposed atheist ideology, in which there might be some social pressure to deny belief in God, one can venture conservative estimates of the number of unbelievers in the world today. Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam’s—let alone as long as Christianity’s? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be.
Fulfilling day
I had a day full of ups and downs today. first of all it was one of the happiest thing that can happen to me in kl. Dear came to visit her sis and play in KL with her fren. Lydia jie was stayin at Sri Petaling. So today early morning i edi woke up. travelled to sri petaling to pick dear up. The initial plan was i wanted to bring her to Taman Tasik Titiwangsa and sit the ferris wheel 1 but then tak jadi coz it was kinda late when we left sri petaling. scared got jam bcoz of friday prayers and school ending time. i have grammar paper at 2.30pm so tak jadi do much lah. Brought her to Tmn Paramount to eat. Brought Jas along also since dear so long din see Jas d. They talked so much i listen oni, i dont mind though. I just wan to look at dear, enuff d. After we finish eating and sending Jas back to her place, I drove to KL to drop dear off at Puduraya for her to take a bus home. Reached Puduraya around 12.25 like dat. Her ticket at 1, i wanted to teman her wait for bus 1 but then that area hard to find parking so i terpaksa drop her off oni lo. Happy story end here.
Now cames the sad story. I studied grammar so much and so convincingly d that i am sure that i can do it with eyes closed. I even revised it again b4 the paper. When i went in, kena "mind blot". A few points cant come to my head. I cant recall what are the 5 linking verbs and i cant explain tag questions convincingly. first time i kena "mind blot" man. everytime i can escape by relying to my intelligence and common sense but this time both deserted me. I think its because of the time of the exam. what a cursed time to have exam at 2.30pm-4.30pm. if it was in the morning kan baik. i can do the paper properly and i enjoy the day with dear. maybe even go back to malacca with her.
Later on after the grammar paper, Dr. Carmen appeared in our class to give back our CRT THK journal. i got more participation marks that i asked for. I got maximum.Woohoo. Thanks alot Dr. Carmen. Then i noticed a piece of folded paper but i din go open it to read la coz i was busy reading her comments on my journals. I only found out what was in the folded paper when my friends were talking about their love letters from Carmen. Haha. Then i proceeded to open mine lo. Mine is one whole page full of comments. Practically it is divided into 2. The first half are praises and the second half was constructive criticism. I will admit that you got me on a few things that not many ppl know about me. Congrats for seeing thru the smokescreen that i put up. I appreciate the comments a lot and i believe it can make me a better person.
I did all the reading while waiting for everyone to gather because we're goin to Central Market to watch some films made by independent directors and producers. The screening is part of the merdeka thingy and the films have a lot to do with the untold stories of our nation. We left for Tmn Jaya LRT station at arnd 5.30pm, peak jam hr. It took me arnd 20 mins to reach. Haih! We then all took LRT to pasar seni station lo and then proceeded to central market. We had our dinner there. Shan met up with us there coz she went back home first. The moment she came, she started testing food from all of us. it can be said that she already ate a portion that equals to a person's. LOL. After dinner we straight went for the screening lo. the place wasn't that big and it was jam packed with people. Dapat sambutan hangat lah. I din expect it. It was partially and eye opener to me coz i have read some of the things i saw today. Faedah membaca banyak. Hehe. The 4 films that we watched was good but one thing that i didn't really like was Sharwin's loud laughing. Very disturbing la. I'm not trying to hurt his feelings or anything la, i just want to say what i feel and what others might feel so that he can change. If he laughs when everyone is also laughing then its ok lah but then he is also laughing at things that are not funny. I find it a little childish on his part la. Bro harap u tak kisah kalau you baca. Ini untuk u perbaiki diri. The public Q&A sessions came and went without any questions from my coursemates and me. Others in the audience did gave comments and ask questions.
This is the post screening period. I saw Michelle went up to Eunice who was one of the producers of the first film about CPM leader Chin Peng, his comrades and his fight for his right to come back to M'sia. I didn't want to get involved one at first. So i went around looking at the pictures around the room lo coz they were kinda interesting. After that i saw all my coursemates gathering around Fahmi Reza and asking him questions. So i go kepo and listen lo. Then sumthing tugged at my mind about his comments earlier. When he was about to answer me, we were all ask to leave the room as the crew want to clean up the room. When i left the room, sumthing shocking happened. I dunno who "tembak" my name to be interviewed. Samore said i am the top student. Kononnye. I hate the camera on my face and i was trying my best to avoid laughin when interviewed. I even stuttered. Argh. Next time dont "tembak" my name for interviews d. I dont like cameras ! If wan do it in a less stressing environment. Ajak me to cozy cafe lah. Then i'll talk. Haha. Oh ya ask Sarah Tan to interview me. I'm getting distracted d. Haha. Asking melebih-lebih pula. After the interview finish, Fahmi managed to answer my earlier question. I found that his explanation wasn't that convincing but doesn't matter lah coz each person can have their own views. Oh ya, i remembered someone asking Fahmi why he used BM to reply during Q&A sessions although his English is good. In my opinion, that is so damn distasteful. No offence meant to the person ar but i think that this kind of question shouldn't even be asked at all lah. It's his right to speak his own language lah. Whats wrong with BM. I'm proud of BM and i love BM. Dont give me the argument that we're Chinese and why we should speak BM at all. What i can say about that kind of attitude is "Arh, go to hell lah, why be malaysian, get lost la." Sorry la, abit emo here coz i hate ppl discriminating races and even languages. Remember what Dr Teh said, all languages are equal to linguists and none are better than others.
After that i went around looking at books and CDs on sale. As i was looking around, suddenly some one offered me 4 issues of magazines that cost RM4 each. So lucky lah me, others din get. Carmen also din get. Wahaha. After that we went back lo. Upon getting down at Tmn Jaya, we went to the A&W outlet there. Haha, i missed the Rootbir float!! so i ordered one double icecream large. We're all sitting together and plan to have discussion 1 but my "loner" personality emerged that time. I was busy reading the magazines given to me, sitting outside the discussion circle that was going on. Dr.Carmen commented on that later when we were leaving. That was the part of me that she din manage to see thru the smokescreen but today everyone saw d lo. I am a quiet person sometimes. Actually i have a few personal reasons why i didn't want to join the discussion lah. Don't want to reveal anymore. I wan to be an enigma. Cannot let ppl understand all of me la. Later no fun d.
Okay! I think this is about all for today's post. One last parting comment: I enjoyed the whole day especially the time with you my dear.
Now cames the sad story. I studied grammar so much and so convincingly d that i am sure that i can do it with eyes closed. I even revised it again b4 the paper. When i went in, kena "mind blot". A few points cant come to my head. I cant recall what are the 5 linking verbs and i cant explain tag questions convincingly. first time i kena "mind blot" man. everytime i can escape by relying to my intelligence and common sense but this time both deserted me. I think its because of the time of the exam. what a cursed time to have exam at 2.30pm-4.30pm. if it was in the morning kan baik. i can do the paper properly and i enjoy the day with dear. maybe even go back to malacca with her.
Later on after the grammar paper, Dr. Carmen appeared in our class to give back our CRT THK journal. i got more participation marks that i asked for. I got maximum.Woohoo. Thanks alot Dr. Carmen. Then i noticed a piece of folded paper but i din go open it to read la coz i was busy reading her comments on my journals. I only found out what was in the folded paper when my friends were talking about their love letters from Carmen. Haha. Then i proceeded to open mine lo. Mine is one whole page full of comments. Practically it is divided into 2. The first half are praises and the second half was constructive criticism. I will admit that you got me on a few things that not many ppl know about me. Congrats for seeing thru the smokescreen that i put up. I appreciate the comments a lot and i believe it can make me a better person.
I did all the reading while waiting for everyone to gather because we're goin to Central Market to watch some films made by independent directors and producers. The screening is part of the merdeka thingy and the films have a lot to do with the untold stories of our nation. We left for Tmn Jaya LRT station at arnd 5.30pm, peak jam hr. It took me arnd 20 mins to reach. Haih! We then all took LRT to pasar seni station lo and then proceeded to central market. We had our dinner there. Shan met up with us there coz she went back home first. The moment she came, she started testing food from all of us. it can be said that she already ate a portion that equals to a person's. LOL. After dinner we straight went for the screening lo. the place wasn't that big and it was jam packed with people. Dapat sambutan hangat lah. I din expect it. It was partially and eye opener to me coz i have read some of the things i saw today. Faedah membaca banyak. Hehe. The 4 films that we watched was good but one thing that i didn't really like was Sharwin's loud laughing. Very disturbing la. I'm not trying to hurt his feelings or anything la, i just want to say what i feel and what others might feel so that he can change. If he laughs when everyone is also laughing then its ok lah but then he is also laughing at things that are not funny. I find it a little childish on his part la. Bro harap u tak kisah kalau you baca. Ini untuk u perbaiki diri. The public Q&A sessions came and went without any questions from my coursemates and me. Others in the audience did gave comments and ask questions.
This is the post screening period. I saw Michelle went up to Eunice who was one of the producers of the first film about CPM leader Chin Peng, his comrades and his fight for his right to come back to M'sia. I didn't want to get involved one at first. So i went around looking at the pictures around the room lo coz they were kinda interesting. After that i saw all my coursemates gathering around Fahmi Reza and asking him questions. So i go kepo and listen lo. Then sumthing tugged at my mind about his comments earlier. When he was about to answer me, we were all ask to leave the room as the crew want to clean up the room. When i left the room, sumthing shocking happened. I dunno who "tembak" my name to be interviewed. Samore said i am the top student. Kononnye. I hate the camera on my face and i was trying my best to avoid laughin when interviewed. I even stuttered. Argh. Next time dont "tembak" my name for interviews d. I dont like cameras ! If wan do it in a less stressing environment. Ajak me to cozy cafe lah. Then i'll talk. Haha. Oh ya ask Sarah Tan to interview me. I'm getting distracted d. Haha. Asking melebih-lebih pula. After the interview finish, Fahmi managed to answer my earlier question. I found that his explanation wasn't that convincing but doesn't matter lah coz each person can have their own views. Oh ya, i remembered someone asking Fahmi why he used BM to reply during Q&A sessions although his English is good. In my opinion, that is so damn distasteful. No offence meant to the person ar but i think that this kind of question shouldn't even be asked at all lah. It's his right to speak his own language lah. Whats wrong with BM. I'm proud of BM and i love BM. Dont give me the argument that we're Chinese and why we should speak BM at all. What i can say about that kind of attitude is "Arh, go to hell lah, why be malaysian, get lost la." Sorry la, abit emo here coz i hate ppl discriminating races and even languages. Remember what Dr Teh said, all languages are equal to linguists and none are better than others.
After that i went around looking at books and CDs on sale. As i was looking around, suddenly some one offered me 4 issues of magazines that cost RM4 each. So lucky lah me, others din get. Carmen also din get. Wahaha. After that we went back lo. Upon getting down at Tmn Jaya, we went to the A&W outlet there. Haha, i missed the Rootbir float!! so i ordered one double icecream large. We're all sitting together and plan to have discussion 1 but my "loner" personality emerged that time. I was busy reading the magazines given to me, sitting outside the discussion circle that was going on. Dr.Carmen commented on that later when we were leaving. That was the part of me that she din manage to see thru the smokescreen but today everyone saw d lo. I am a quiet person sometimes. Actually i have a few personal reasons why i didn't want to join the discussion lah. Don't want to reveal anymore. I wan to be an enigma. Cannot let ppl understand all of me la. Later no fun d.
Okay! I think this is about all for today's post. One last parting comment: I enjoyed the whole day especially the time with you my dear.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Work in KL
just got a call from my ex employers..they wan me to work for them during my 3 months holidays. i also want to get a work during the 3 months but the problem is i want to work in melaka not KL.
they ask me to work in their newly opened Concept Store somewhere in Bukit Bintang. I'm in PJ now and if i accept the offer i have to travel to Bukit Bintang everyday and i'll be stayin put here without time to go home..sure boring gile 1..how ar?
i cant decide lah..i really want to work. maybe i should try out life in KL without going home lah..but 3 months straight lah..can i stand it?
got pros and cons lah but argh, i'm so undecided..
they ask me to work in their newly opened Concept Store somewhere in Bukit Bintang. I'm in PJ now and if i accept the offer i have to travel to Bukit Bintang everyday and i'll be stayin put here without time to go home..sure boring gile 1..how ar?
i cant decide lah..i really want to work. maybe i should try out life in KL without going home lah..but 3 months straight lah..can i stand it?
got pros and cons lah but argh, i'm so undecided..
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
human after all
i guess i'm human after all and not a person without emotions. i did a lot of soul searching during the study week which i'm supposed to be studying but unfortunately i didn't study at all. i discovered that i do have my emo times, its just that the "button" is different from everyone else. i dont get emotional when i see people suffering from war, hunger, disease, abuse and etc. it doesnt mean anything to me. alot people will say i am heartless but what can i do about it? its just me. you cant force me and i dont like to fake, so pura-pura emotional is not the way out.
i do get emotional when i see tragic things happen. i've been watching alot of HBO, CINEMAX and STAR MOVIES alot during the study week and 2 movies did alot to bring the human side out of me. i got emotional watching those movies! cant believe it man.. The motion picture depicting the life of the late Selena caused me to shed tears. the combination of her ever so lovely song "I Could Fall in Love" and the scenes caused me to shed a tear. so tragic and touching.
the other show that brought emotions out of me was Pride & Prejudice..it was adapted from Jane Austen's book. no wonder keira knightley got nominated for Oscars..her depiction of elizabeth bennet was great..so was rosamund pike..the beautiful jane bennet. the finishing part got me emotional cause it was so romantic and lovely..i'm a romantic person thats y romantic things get me emotional..haha
i do get emotional when i see tragic things happen. i've been watching alot of HBO, CINEMAX and STAR MOVIES alot during the study week and 2 movies did alot to bring the human side out of me. i got emotional watching those movies! cant believe it man.. The motion picture depicting the life of the late Selena caused me to shed tears. the combination of her ever so lovely song "I Could Fall in Love" and the scenes caused me to shed a tear. so tragic and touching.
the other show that brought emotions out of me was Pride & Prejudice..it was adapted from Jane Austen's book. no wonder keira knightley got nominated for Oscars..her depiction of elizabeth bennet was great..so was rosamund pike..the beautiful jane bennet. the finishing part got me emotional cause it was so romantic and lovely..i'm a romantic person thats y romantic things get me emotional..haha
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