natural disasters part 2: kinslaying?
Or not really; more like man-made.
I watched in horror earlier today how a stampede to rival the Hillsborough football grounds disaster in 1989 may have killed as many as 1,000 shiite muslims while on a funeral march for a dead imam who they believe is a successor to prophet Muhammad.
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Horrible scenes reminded me of some photos I researched for my boss regarding hurricanes and tropical cyclones. Those pictures didn’t look as bad as these..
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I’ve been wondering what to say on Merdeka Day, reminding myself of that old adage “if you’ve got nothing good to say, then shut up”. On past national days, I’ve always woken up bemused, happy for the holiday, but not quite sure how significant it was - and is. When I was in Singapore some time back, I used to be fed primordialist facts during the course of their National Education program; Sang Nila Utama and blah blah blah. I’ve always found such ‘foundational myths’ amusing and I wonder about our country’s own.
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I was browsing through Ektopos when I ran into an interesting link, something I’ve seen pop up in politicaltheory.net. It’s a brief overview of “Cultural Revolutions: Reason versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and Jihad” by Lawrence E. Cahoone, and one of his more interesting starting points is a lament that ‘culture’ as a term is not clear enough. The review is over here.
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Imagine your force of 7,000 warriors, decimated and holding on by a hair’s-breadth on a narrow pass flanked by the walls of a steep mountain and the sea down below. What did Leonidas say to his men on that last day, when treacherous Thebans defected to the Persian enemy? What did he say when confronted, finally, by the spectre of a thousand thousand men arrayed against his own?
What must he have thought when he saw the screaming hordes advancing against his 600 Thespians and the remnants of his own 300?
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race in malaysia: The Economist weighs in
While scouring around political theory, I stumbled across this article from the Economist:
Race in Malaysia: Failure to spread wealth. It’s an.. interesting read, and while I hate posting articles without commenting on them, I don’t think I can add more to what’s been said.
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hishammudin tells it like a man, ya?
I saw this at MageP’s Lab.
A keris is a dagger? A bladed weapon? A sword? A feudal symbol of struggle? Am I getting this right? No one should be afraid of someone brandishing a weapon?
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I’m paraphrasing some of the bits below:-
Connie :”Ooh, Dostoyevsky, so dark, so gritty, so existential”
Jerry Falk (aside, thinking): “Who cares about Dostoyevsky when Amanda’s there talking to him?”
(and that is precisely the damn point!)
—–
Dobel stops the car, and turns to Falk. “I have this producer friend and he needs a team of writers to write comedy for him. And I was thinking maybe you and I, we could do it. ‘Course, it’s in California.”
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All pictures sourced from the BBC. At least 42 dead so far, according to the Beebs, and there are no indications of any let up. From what I’ve read, apparently rains and the subsequent rise of waters have led to massive floods in many parts of Europe. The waters seem still in picture on the right; eerie, even.
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I once had the displeasure of dealing with a client, let’s call him SM, described as a ‘hard-nosed customer’. I don’t mean to sound elitist in what follows, so bear with me. It’s quite a long post, too.
SM’s “handlers” fear him, and when they speak of him, you can hear the strain on their voices; and I’m not just imagining things. This fella is what one would call a typical “bang-table” bastard. And that’s not all, minutes before my meeting with him, I was on the phone with one of his ‘handlers’:
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mein gott! assassination is good!
Meanwhile, US TV Evangelist Mr Pat Robertson believes assassination is good.
You see? We have Muslim ‘fundamentalists’ and we have rip-roaring American, Bible-bashing fundamentalists. The Cosmic Balance is restored!
Holy Puck! Did KL just get dissed?!
I learned about this from Luthien, drew some conclusions and landed up at Xiaxue’s blog! Holy shitnitz! She said..
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Let’s say you’ve got 3 competing theories about the world, universe and everything in general. Suppose each of these theories presents a different take on the world, a different point of view. How would you decide which has the most validity? I suppose in science, viz. the natural world, you determine which has the most ability to explain natural phenomena. With religion, it becomes far more dicey, because the religious dimension is essentially social in that it operates as beliefs held by people.
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Have you watched “Unleashed”? The one with Jet Li?
If you have, you’ll know that there’s a beautiful, haunting track right at the end. No, you won’t find it on the soundtracks of both “Danny the Dog” (UK?) and “Unleashed”. Soundtrack(s), btw, done by Massive Attack (and done bloody well, too).
That last track as the credits roll? It’s called “Aftersun”, and it’s by Dot Allison. More info here.
I went crazy over that track for some time, and am now rediscovering why. Thank god for P2P.
The general malaise persists at the workplace. It’s been this way for some days now, and the gloom is not helped by the incessant rain. It started like the clouds overhead this morning, before rumour bloomed into a fullblown deluge of ill-feeling and general out-of-sort-ness.
Which didn’t help my awful headache today. And that easy complication was solved by a dose of ponstan which, I have been told, is now illegal in Malaysia. Really? My banged-up knee troubled me while I contemplated, for the nth time, upgrading my computer. All of that while sipping coffee and apparently waiting for the day cloned cat kitties start taking charge of the situation and begin Human Eradication Plan 001.
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