It was funny to Malaysians how out of touch our IT minister was and how far the ruling party was willing to go to put a stop to the use of tech that had mobilized the opposition movement and given voice to descent.

In response the Twitterverse lit up with #yorais posts, making potent satire out of pure idiocy. Gotta love it!

It’s died down a bit but check out what’s been posted target=”_blank”. I’m proud to be Malaysian!

My Favourite #yorais tweet:
RT @mikeyvoon: #yorais is so out of touch. He wants to ban ALAMAK! He thinks it’s Western for Mother of God.

When someone can tell you how you’re meant to pray, what words you are allowed when crying out to the divine, ’subjugation’ just doesn’t cut it.

It is for the same purpose that we seek to use that word. We aren’t trying to bestow the Name upon any one or thing we think lowly. We don’t seek to disparage or denigrate Its Meaning or your reverence for It. We want to use It in the same way that you do. To speak of God.

To debate me on this is fair enough. But that you have put aside your benignity to burn down a place of worship… you have done more damage to His Name than you sought to fend off.

I live in a country forever in fear of May. Forever gripped by the thought that its right arm might once again rise to do harm to its other members.

It’s a fear, a terror that keeps me in silence. I don’t seek equality. I don’t seek freedom of speech, or to be naturalized or feel enfranchised in the country of my grandfather’s birth.

But I settle for a peace. On the brink. And I am worth more. More than enough to be called a son of this soil. More than enough to pray dalam bahasa negaraku (in the language of my country). In words yang dipilih olehku (that are chosen by me).

My blood is worth more spent in my veins than spilt, our churches worth more to our communities upright than burnt.

Even to a Muslim.

So I don’t get it. I don’t understand why I’m not of you. Why I can’t call God as you do. And why you get to direct, move, pacify and rule

me.

With the LHC, Physicists hope to produce the Higgs boson, a scalar elementary particle thought to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Things keep going wrong with the LHC though. After its last mishap, on September 19th, 2008, the Collider has been in repair ever since.

Overbye brings to the fore theories by two physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. Described by Overbye as two “otherwise distinguished physicists”, Nielsen and Ninomiya are kicking around the idea of the Higgs boson being “so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one.” Heavy!

Nielsen is my favourite of the two. He posits that God “rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Now I know there are God fearing physicists out there, I’ve seen a couple pray even. Having a physicist include God in the way that Nielsen did though – placing all of his colleagues in a holy little playpen – was downright . . . divine!

As benighted as it sounds, I take comfort in that playpen. We’re at an age when anything seems possible and our undoing more likely than enlightenment. I don’t know if I’d ask for brakes, but boundaries…are appreciated, dear Lord. And, yes, there is a part of me that cringes at the fact that I’d have that thought. Yet another part had it, and won out enough for me to write the thing down.

As for the wackiness in Nielsen and Ninomiya’s theories, my favourite bit from Overbye follows below:

Sure, it’s crazy… The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Dr. Nielsen’s late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

I think an academic discussing the very foundations of our universe has to be a little out of it. It of course being the cradle with conventions and rules you’ve accepted but not yet explained. True, I’d rather see some of that creativity in our economics, at present. But before this sucker blows, let’s see how far these physicists, scientists and theorists get us. Maybe they’ll reach higher than Babel. OK, yeah…that’s the other part talking.

Read the rest of Overbye’s essay here.

BENDERA then outlined their plan to “invade” Malaysia. Say WHAT?

Indonesia’s population is estimated to be around 229,965,000. Malaysia’s comes in at around 28,310,000. Why would we want to piss our LARGER neighbour off?

Between His Royal Highness Ike Turner, maid abuse horror stories and Malaysian ships in desperate need of some freggin’ GPS, I’d say they have plenty of reasons to hate us.

Still, I would appreciate it if they made it a little easier for us to take them seriously. My countrymen need to learn their lesson. But if the reckoning coming is going to look as ridiculous as BENDERA does right now, Malaysians won’t change a damn thing!

Please stop breaking blocks over your head and sharpening Satay sticks. We need the fear of God knocked into us, people! And an angry mob that can be stopped by scheduling problems, isn’t a mob worth fearing at all.

What do you mean the invasion’s been postponed? Did your day job hit you up on your Blackberry?

Know what…it’s a tactic. They’re trying to have us in stitches so we don’t see what hit us when they do come.

O and did you happen to catch that “satu rumpun” mess? “Satu rumpun.” “Satu Malaysia.” When did our government turn Buddhist? Typical totalitarians, they wanna be one with everything!

After a “legal dispute” derailed EMI’s plans to release his new LP, Dark Night of the Soul, Danger Mouse found his own way to fight back.

He was the producing-half of Gnarls Barkley and the genius behind the (in)famous Grey Album. Now his next release will be a collectors boxed-set with detailed liner notes, album art and … a blank CD.

Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Joseph Burton) intends for fans to download/record their own copy of the album (now streaming online through NPR), and burn it to the packaged CD-R.

Just because a label says no why should Burton’s work be confined to torrents and bootleg MP3s? And if my dollar has to go somewhere, I’d be glad to send it the way of a great musician who thinks so far outside the box, the law has yet to catch up.

Also, by putting out a blank CD-R with trimmings, he takes a shot at the business models labels are pursuing online — all born out of a paranoia that if the track goes free, they’re doomed.

Here’s a producer who has a label standing in his way and he manages to figure out how to work the situation to his advantage. Give the music away for free and have ‘em pay for the liner notes.

I hope he tops Billboard with a blank CD. Even if he doesn’t, I adore the guy for trying.

When it has gotten to this point though, you have to ask yourself who exactly are standing in the way of the artist.

Dark Night of the Soul can currently be streamed on NPR Music for free (here).

Trailer:

First 3 minutes:

It being the opening weekend of J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek, I figured we could use an update on super-fast space travel. Apparently Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a Warp Drive might one day become science-fact. Could you ever have doubted it?

Some physicists say the faster-than-light travel technology may one day enable humans to jet between stars for weekend getaways. Clearly it won’t be an easy task. The science is complex, but not strictly impossible, according to some researchers studying how to make it happen. Read on.

Did some casual surfing and stumbled upon this blog. Its owner lives in Mexico and works for the British Embassy there.

We’ve heard so much about the larger impact of the Swine Flu but this…this is an outbreak from one person’s perspective — travel plans, daily grind and rented DVDs.

In times of panic the best of writers can start to ramble but the entries here are genuinely readable. There is also something extremely compelling about having the option to leave but wanting to stay because you’ve made a home where you are.

Definitely worth a click.

The Economist, March 21st-27th 2009

… The rise of China over the past three decades has been astonishing. But it has lacked the one feature it needed fully to satisfy the ultranationalist fringe: an accompanying decline of the West. Now capitalism is in a funk in its heartlands. Europe and Japan, embroiled in the deepest post-war recession, are barely worth consideration as rivals. America, the superpower, has passed its peak. Although in public China’s leaders eschew triumphalism, there is a sense in Beijing that the reassertion of the Middle Kingdom’s global ascendancy is at hand.
Read on…

The cover’s bold. I don’t see things being quite as dramatic as the Economist makes them out to be though.

Yes, America has lost some of it’s edge — being broke will do that to you — but I don’t think we’re quite at seeing the fall of the West. At the same time, I don’t see the problems mentioned in the article as being China’s main hurdles to becoming a full-fledged superpower.

Take the “rumblings of discontent” mentioned (in the 5th para). I don’t think China’s ascent requires a resolution to every national problem. If her economy will hold, her people will.

And when it comes to China’s reluctance to “intervene in other countries’ affairs” (8th para), that is something she’ll get over.

China still needs the cooperation of a West that is already paranoid and looking over its shoulder. A restrained approach to global politics serves the Middle Kingdom well for now, easing the minds of statesmen who’ve rarely been subject to the values of other nations. That will change the moment China is powerful enough to assert her own values.

The thing that the article got right is the question in its title. Yet it reads more like “How Western Countries See China”.

I’d like to know how China’s view of the world will come to impact me, and I think that’s the question on most people’s minds.

No one in the mainstream media has managed to frame this right, and not for a lack of trying. Their titles and opening paragraphs, however, seem to indicate that they’re aware of the questions they should be asking.

It’s amazing to me that they can’t even extrapolate the view from someone else’s window, being too tied to the view from their own.

I don’t know whether it wears that title well. I wouldn’t put on a Ms. CleoPod for any amount of money. But this prototype is an astounding leap forward in computing that had this techie in glee.

“This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.” (from TED.com)

Elizabeth Wong is a State Assemblywoman and an EXCO member of the KeADILan party (opposition).

Last week nude photos, taken of her in the privacy of her own home, were leaked and distributed without Wong’s consent or knowledge.

She resigned earlier today, stating, “My personal life and privacy has [sic] been violated.” Wong also stressed, in her statement, that she has done nothing wrong and was not ashamed of her sexuality as a single woman.

More power to you! Lord knows this society wields shame like a weapon.

The only thing I found reproachful was the invasion of Wong’s privacy — and possibly, I’m ashamed to say, the fact that she used “has” instead of “have” in the statement above. But that’s not why I’m blogging about Wong, and so I’ll digress.

In researching her today, I stumbled upon her Flickr photostream, one of the first things that pop up when you Google her name.

Her photos are really great to look at and they broke that wall I usually place between myself and any story.

She is a really great photographer. And I hope this unfortunate incident doesn’t put her off the practice altogether. It really would be a shame.

I’m putting this up in the hopes that when you talk about her this week, you remember that’s she’s not that different from you or someone you know…who’s also on flickr.

51st Grammy Awards Highlights: Best Moments
51st Grammy Awards Arrivals: Red Carpet

Related: Good Love Gone Bad: Chris Brown attacks Rihanna

19 year-old Chris Brown has been charged for assaulting (he bit and punched up) his girlfriend Rihanna. He’s out on $50,000 bail.

I hope Rihanna’s ok but more than that I hope she got a few kicks of her own in. Hopefully at Brown’s nuts. Ri has the same birthday as me, Feb 20th. This year she turns 21. Ms. Fenty, start dating older men. Conincidentally, I’ll be turning 25.

Rihanna has cancelled two concerts this week. One in Jakarta (previously postponed to this Thursday due to a bomb threat in the Indonesian capital, now pulled altogether). She has also postponed her concert in Kuala Lumpur, originally scheduled for this Friday.

Malaysian fans will have to wait two weeks to hear from Pineapple Concerts about a new date.

I’m disappointed. Was hoping to snag an interview.

Got the scoop from the concert’s organizers about the postponement yesterday but as always didn’t get a chance to blog about it because I was on the clock. The story was a clicker on MSN though.

Get caught up: Making sense of the Perak controversy »

The note basically emphatically reassures Malaysians that money spent with McDonalds won’t go toward Israel’s current regime or any of their wars. Full translation follows below.

NOTICE FROM McDONALD’S MALAYSIA

To the honourable People of Malaysia,

As you may already be aware, certain parties have accused McDonald’s of providing assistance to Israel’s regime. We would like to make clear that THOSE ACCUSATIONS ARE ALTOGETHER FALSE. McDonald’s Malaysia has never and will never support any wars conducted anywhere, through sales or profits that are obtained from restaurants — our restaurants.

This is because:

• McDonald’s Malaysia is an organization that was formed under the laws of Malaysia.
• Our management as well as our 8,000 over employees are citizens of Malaysia and various other countries.
• We prepare food and drinks specially for the people of Malaysia and work together with our suppliers who are also Malaysian.
• We pay taxes every year to the Malaysian government.
• We support and carry out various community and welfare programs for the people of Malaysia, especially for children who are less fortunate through our welfare body, Ronald McDonald House Charities Malaysia.

If you have any other concerns, please direct all your questions to justtellus@my.mcd.com or contact our Corporate Communications Office on 03-7843 3233

Yours truly,
AZMIR JAAFAR
Managing Director

Rihanna, now it’s your turn to do the same
Read: PAS asks for ban on Rihanna concert

Found this on YouTube:

Not an eye was on Beyonce and you can tell it got to her a little

BTW: On his second day in office Obama ordered the shutdown of Guantanamo (albeit moving all the prisoners to Australia – which is a little ole’ school British of him), ordered a cutback of troops to Iraq, instructed generals to draw up plans for a withdrawal and fought to save his blackberry (Read all about it!).

Progress!

I don’t care where you are in the world, the end of the Bush reign is something to celebrate.

I pondered what I’d post to mark the day when a friend, Uma, wrote something that I couldn’t better. He is probably one of our best writers and the only Malaysian more optimistic than I am about America’s possibilities.

His column happens to run on Tuesdays (today) and it makes for the perfect read on a day when hope is a little less audacious and a new found optimism lightens the weight of a tough road ahead.

Enjoy.

In it he runs through the crimes committed by European societies against the Jews, fueled by a fear and hatred of the latter. He uses it to justify his own anti-semitism. Then he goes further, listing offenses the Jews have committed in Islamic history.

Moving quickly past the obvious fallacies in his argument – one, that a people may not be deserving of the fear and hatred they receive and two, that religious texts are rarely good historical sources – let me move on to the part for which I have the most disdain.

He kicks off his final paragraph with, “Kita bukan anti kaum tertentu, atau anti-semitic secara membabi buta seperti Hitler atau masyarakat Eropah dahulu.” (We are not against any particular race or anti-semitic in the way that Hitler and the societies of Europe were, blind and without logic.) “Namun jika kita melihat Yahudi Israel hari ini mengkhianati perjanjian atau bersikap jahat, itu bukanlah perkara baru dan pelik untuk mereka kerjakan.” (But if we look at the Jews of today’s Israel, them going back on their word and their immoral nature, it isn’t something new or unexpected for them to be so capable.) “Kepercayaan Hitler itu, mungkin ada benarnya.” (Maybe there was truth in Hitler’s beliefs.)

The columnist, Dr Maza, doesn’t deny his anti-semitism or prejudice outright. He claims that “we” aren’t prejudiced “secara membabi buta”.

So I guess as long as the pig isn’t blind all is well!

What worries me the most about the clear anti-semitism expressed in this column is that it is often followed, in Malaysia, by a wave of anti-Sinoism (hostility toward or prejudice against the Chinese), a culture that men like Dr Maza have within their power to oppress.

Politicians, pundits and commentators here often draw comparisons between what the Jews did in Europe to what the Chinese have done here, economically. It ends up being a justification for anything short of a holocaust. We had our Kristallnacht just not an Auschwitz, and that apparently gives Maza the right to claim he’s more evolved in his sense of prejudice.

I whole-heartedly disapprove of the actions of Israel in the recent Gaza conflict. My friends can’t shut me up about it. But evil is never as simple as a race, a people or a country. Just as genius needs its mistakes and just as heroes can often show themselves to be cads before a moment of glory, lines blur. You judge actions just as the law should judge persons charged. Never a people.

There might have been truth in Hitler. His mustache was true-black on a Bravia (homeboy was as Aryan as me). But truth in hatred is no truth worth having at all. You may have reason to hate someone but every religion, even yours Dr. Maza, asks that you let it go for your own sake.

I am ever more weary and less forgiving of learned men who would exercise prejudice against an entire race of people. They’ve had every opportunity to notice the determined nature of individual consciences. To see that people can always surprise.

They’ve done the math and still they decide that the thoughts and actions of a majority is enough to diminish the rights and standing of an entire race of people. That summation, symptomatic of a lazy approach to life (in my opinion), puts me off.

I wish I could tell you that I feel deep shame over the sentiment expressed by this Dr Maza. I don’t. He isn’t of me. And our divide speaks to a deeper one in my country, a nation that remains in pieces.

I’m just looking to the academic institution that gave him his Ph.D. With an argument made in such bad form, somebody should take something back!

It’s a timely chuckle as we send George W. Bush Jr. off and prep for the new guy.

This is probably the only smart phone more intuitive, usable and just plain cooler than Apple’s iPhone. Shown at CES ‘09 today.

Bets had been cast on when the company would throw in the towel, in recent years, but Palm hung in there and did a very smart thing. They worked out the kinks in their marketing and distribution with devices like the Centro, before laying the golden egg, a device that could truly revolutionize the way users interact with a handheld.

Palm’s made a great statement with the Pre and its webOS: Good design is a part of the company’s DNA. I knew they had it in ‘em!

I know that part of the reason why so many are harping on this is because Ms. Winfrey got a little self-righteous after her weight-loss — well more than a little, coming out screaming, “I get it people…I GET IT,” wearing lycra. Part of me does wonder though whether she’d have to answer that much for her physical appearance if she were a successful male.

Winfrey is worth US$2.7 billion dollars (according to Forbes). She was once the world’s only black billionaire. I don’t measure someone’s worth by their wealth but with the odds she’s beaten and the cultural impact she has had, why are we still on her belly?

What’s probably the worst thing about this is that it’s self inflicted. She called herself out. Guess she wanted to curb the backlash. Wish she held out.

The Iraqi journalist, one Muntazer al-Zaidi, ended up with a few broken ribs and a broken arm.

Bush once said that history would be his judge. Even though the American President, on his way out, laughs and shrugs off the criticism and flying shoes, I think he has to know by now that history will not remember him well. Even he can’t duck out of that one.

A Malaysian man died after being stabbed in the chest in a row that erupted after he was accused of hogging the microphone at a karaoke venue… (MSN News)

It could be a legitimate change in scheduled programming, the ruling having gone out late in the day. Hope they air the RPK interview eventually.

UPDATE: DEC 03
It aired tonight.

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always felt that Malaysians were never ready for the live-in maids that middle-class households suddenly became able to afford in the 1990s. The living arrangements never seemed quite right and the boundaries (physical and non-) were never properly drawn. We take liberties with them that we wouldn’t take with anyone else, in any other set-up or situation.

This wasn’t the first case of its kind and in the other ones that memory serves the guilty were all, for other intents and purposes, rational and functional citizens who stepped over the line.

It’s shameful. So shameful in fact that I’m almost certain we won’t deal with it. We never broach the uncomfortable creases.

Yoga has been made “haram” for Muslims by Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council.

Taken from a piece inThe Sunday Star:

[National Fatwa Council] chairman Datuk Dr Abdul Shukor Husin said yoga had been practised by the Hindu community for thousands of years and incorporated physical movements, religious elements together with chants and worshipping, with the aim of “being one with God”.
…
“Because of this, we believe that it is inappropriate for Muslims to do yoga. The council is declaring that practising yoga, when it comes together with the three elements, is haram,” he told a press conference here yesterday.
…
“In Islam, a believer must not do things that can erode one’s aqidah or faith. Doing yoga, even just the physical movements, is a step towards erosion of one’s faith in the religion, hence Muslims should avoid it,” he said.
…
“There are many other forms of exercise that Muslims can partake in, especially when the religion promotes healthy living and lifestyle. Performing prayers, for example, is a good form of exercise,” he said.

I don’t think I need to add anything to that. Defense rests!

I’m fine with expression having limits, but why must your limits be mine. I have eyelids. Put away your scissors.

McCain on SNL’s Weekly Update

Click here for the blow by blow