Recently, I found out through the Malay daily Utusan Malaysia, via Screenshots, that areas near certain nature reserves in Malaysia are being violated, with consent of the state.

There seems to be a public outcry on the issue. It is quite rare to see Malaysians bringing up environmental concerns to the spotlight and this outrage along with the Tioman and the Broga matters might just change that and move the political atmosphere in Malaysia towards the greens’ courtyard. Hence, I am glad that the media brought this unnecessary abuse of the environment to public scrutiny. Else, the loud noise of bulldozers bringing the trees down would go unheard and most Malaysians would still not care for the environment. But then again, that might not be the case since this issue might involves corruption by someone somewhere in the government of excessive size.

I must admit that at the moment, I’m unclear on the issue. I don’t know who is to blame as I am not sure how does the system work. It seems to me however that the state has full control on the matter. Even the Malaysian Prime Minister has been quoted that he won’t interfere with the state government's jurisdiction. Regardless of that, somebody is being negligent and that somebody needs to be identified and brought to justice.

Repairs should of priority and finding the negligent person is secondary. However, a good system is a system that provides satisfying rewards for good behavior and offers sufficient punishment for poor choice of action. To instill good feeling of environmental responsibility and indeed, good governance, such system needs to be in place. So, while repairs should be the uttermost agenda, punishing the person or persons that contribute to the destruction should be of importance.

If the state government fails to do so, then I assert the head of the state of Selangor to resign for failure to protect nature resources that are essential to the people. And using Utusan Malaysia’s own words, translated by Jeff Ooi:

Does it mean that the (Selangor) state government is unaware of the enviromental damage even though the site - government land - is less than 10km from the menteri besar's office?

Clearly, this is incompetence shown on behalf of the Chief Minister. Or at the very least, he doesn’t care. Or didn’t given the fact that the heat is currently on him. And I don't feel comfortable having somebody in office that doesn't care what he is supposed to care.

To come to think of it, Selangor currently has a few major environmental challenges. Apart from this blatant development near of forest reserves, the "world most advance and cleanest" incinerator is to be built in Broga while the world renown firefly refuge in Kuala Selangor is currently suffering a decline in firefly population.

I say enough of this. All this should stop here and now and we should quickly remove the irresponsible legislature(s) that make the destruction possible. I say, let's start with Khir Toyo. I say, the Malaysians blogosphere must move against Khir Toyo. We should do Bloggers against Khir Toyo or something.

Or I might need to play World of Warcraft some more.

Effective yesterday, Ronald Koeman, Ajax's head coach resigns. He has been under a lot of pressure for the past few weeks. The fans' dissatisfaction reaches a new height during the 2 - 0 win over FC Den Bosch last week. Ajax almost lost to the mediocre team - the two goals came after 90 minutes of play. With the disheartening loss in France, majority of the fans could not take it anymore and neither could Koeman.

What a year. We lost van Gaal and now we lost Koeman.

It is no more than three years ago, when everybody was talking about Ajax and how it might have found its new golden generation. I supppose, it will take a few more years for Ajax to get back on its feet after this fiasco.

And god, why don't you give us 10 feet of snow and be done with it already?

Somewhere in Manchester, life must be really beautiful...

...to the Italians. Hurrah to Manchester United's extremely fabulous keeper.

Now, let's see how Ajax will do against an old French foe.

I was there again in MSA Chamber observing the confusing proceeding to pass a resolution against Coke. The victory was confusing too but bottom line is, MSA supports the resolution to call the administration to not renew the University's contract with Coke.

There were some that voiced their opposition towards the resolution. Coke obviously disagrees with the resolution and sent two representatives into MSA Assembly despite the fact that Coke does not represent the students in Michigan.

College Republicans object the Coke resolution. It seems to me that the Republicans oppose the resolution just because the sponsors of the resolution seem to be on the other side of the spectrum - basically, I see the Republicans objecting without having any real concern for the issue. But whatever the Republicans think, it doesn't matter. They are the minority here in Michigan. Their opinion hardly influences anything, as proven in MSA.

And another opposition came from, from my perception, a recipient of Coke scholarship, or at least somebody that benefits from Coke's support to the University. It is my opinion that the opposition expressed from this quarter as the strongest of all. The coalition is somewhat lucky that the system somehow worked against the person that spoke for this one group.

I would say no further until I read the Daily tomorrow.

And also, Channel 4 was in the MSA Chamber too.

A protest was held at the Business School last Thursday in conjunction of Surviving Scrutiny: Corporations in the Age of Global Business. The representative from Coke was obvious uncomfortable with the presence of protestors during her talk.

The Michigan Daily on the other hand didn't quite report what really happened. At the same time, their report seems to be inaccurate.

Anyway, more pixels!


I don't know whether that is legal or not but it's way too cool!


In front of Hale before the talk started.


Getting the 125 feet bottle-link into the auditorium. The person from Coke was distracted by it - when the moderator asked her a question, she asked the moderator to repeat to question.


In the auditorium.


A close-up of the banner in the previous photo.

p/s - switched backed to Blogger's commenting system. The improvement brought by the Blogger team looks good but I can't make it work at the moment.

pp/s - the commeting system is now working. And I didn't even touch the code and it somehow worked.

I was at the Michigan Student Assembly Chambers yesterday, hearing the tabling of a resolution against Coke. Before the session started, probably hundreds of emails flew here and there, presenting idea, news and opinion on the resolution. Seriously, I do think the Killer Coke coalition needs a proper forum instead of a mailing list. It is a daunting task to read all of them with some time constraint in place, especially in a mailbox. However, the highlight of all these email storm was the one sent by the MSA president to the protesting coalition.

He wrote and later said in the meeting that he and others in the MSA board want to postpone the tabling of the motion for another seven days. Reason – they claim that they simply are not sufficiently educated on the issue, despite more than a week worth of effort from certain quarters to inform them of the situation.

Some try to resist the postponement. The Killer Coke coalition obviously wanted the resolution to be voted swiftly but the coalition unfortunately stood almost alone on that. After a few somewhat heated discussions, the MSA voted something like 30 ayes to 2 nays on not voting on the resolution in yesterday session. The representatives from the Coke Bottlers that were there are obviously pleased with the adjournment motion.

Immediately after that, a few people were allowed to speak, both from the coalition and from the Michigan Coke. A person from the coalition, a graduate student from the School of Natural Resource and the Environment as I was informed by a colleague, criticized the MSA board for giving an excuse of ignorance for adjourning the motion after she had read a declaration from workers in India.

A few others from the coalition spoke but most of them only echoed the SNRE graduate's disappointment on MSA postponing the issue to another week. And so, here goes the lobbying again. And I expect, my huge mailbox to be battered some more.

Finally, this coming Thursday, which is tomorrow, somehow, representatives from Starbuck, Nike, Timberland and, drum roll please, Coca Cola are coming to the Michigan Business School for Surviving Scrutiny: Corporations in the Age of Global Business. Imagine the perfect timing of Coke sending in a high level manager to Michigan. Unfortunate for them - definately couldn't be better for us - that the coalition is organizing a huge protest for them.

Boy, this is exciting. LOL!

p/s - also yesterday, I attended a lecture by Joseph Stiglitz.


He is the person with the tie.

He basically talked about the same issues he has written in Globalization and Its Discontent, plus a bit of humor. The auditorium was full and I had to squeze in. More at the Michigan Daily.

pp/s - also, thanks to the Brazilian Maxwell, Ajax 1, Auxerre 0. van der Vaart's pass was great.

ppp/s - Kyoto. =)

It took almost a decade to ratify the pact that tries something to mitigate the biggest environmental issue of our time. Now, time is at hand. The real fight begins in less than a day.

While the treaty will come into force tomorrow, the facilities for emission trading have been set up. One of them is the Chicago Climate Exchange, the CCX. It is the world’s first greenhouse gases exchange. The existence of this exchange will allow companies to buy and sell quotas set forth by the Kyoto Protocol. The market looks thin to me for the moment but I’m sure as time goes by, it will thicken. In Europe, agreements between firms and countries on quota transfer have already been signed upon. I’m unable to provide a link or two on this as the news came out some weeks ago. Wikipedia, the Oracle of the Internet, however does provide some example.

While the implementation of the Protocol takes place, some already fail to prepare themselves for oncoming treaty. The European Union, possibly the green's current best of friends, has sued a few of its members for such failure.

The target of the Protocol is anything but easy and that is why some have failed to comply despite ratification. The pact asserts that by the year 2012, the worldwide level of six greenhouse gases needs to be comparable to 1990 level. I simply believe it is almost impossible to reach that goal. The time frame is simply too short for such grand achievement – economy will grow somehow and so will the emission of the gases.

Yet, this constraint imposed by Kyoto may overcome that skepticism. It has been said that the mother of all inventions is necessity (I say laziness is the father of invention). With the expensive protocol in place, there will come a time to find a cheaper way to implement Kyoto. My take on the solution is technology; in particular, energy efficiency. A breakthrough such as the mass production of fuel cell is highly needed for the 1990 target to be possible.

And of course, future participation by China and India is important. The US and Australia on the other hand are possibly lost in their own reality. Concerning the US, a few states, notably of New England and the Pacific, have taken their own initiative to reduce carbon emission despite the diverging stance by the federal government.

Whatever it is, an ode to Kyoto and the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, the place where it all begun. Kyoto might be imperfect but it is bringing us into the right direction, however short that step really is.

This Gamespot article says it all. We are even outperforming China! w00t!

Special thanks to Bigstig for the lead. LOL!

Reuters reports that US Treasury Secretary John Show has proposed to sell the US gold reserve so that the country may finance the debt relief it has given to poor blocks. According to the same article, the US is the world’s largest stock of gold bullions. I’d imagine the plan sounds extremely reasonable to the poor debtors since it may encourage future debt relief. There is however opposition coming from the US states that produce gold.

The reason for such opposition is simple. Any move to sale the gold reserve by the US will bring the price of gold down as quantity increases. Producers of gold obvious don’t like the idea of seeing the price of the commodity going down.

I’m in the position of supporting the sale. While the sale of bullions will negatively affect the producers of gold, I see benefit outweighing the cost. Few benefits that I can think of are, one, of course, lower liability for the poor nations; two, providing the US with liquid asset that may be used for higher return investment – the bullions probably merely sits in the bank doing nothing; three, environment.

The sale of the bullions will force the producers of gold to cut down its production if they want to preserve the price of the gold. With lower production, polluting material used in the mining of gold such as mercury and cyanide will be reduced.

Let’s see who will win this one. I bet the proposal will be shot down almost effortlessly.

p/s – the Fed wants to rework the way the Federal Open Market Committee announces any of its intention. The powerful independent central bank wants to drop the usage of the magic word ‘accommodating’ and, the better known ‘measured’. The article suggests that the interest rate might increase at a greater rate in the near future.

Already, upon that announcement, the price of T-bills is heading down – reason for such fall is that any hike in interest rate makes other investments offer better return than bond. With lower return relatively to other investment option, demand for current bond fall and, with falling demand, comes falling price.

And that happens because the Fed wants to drop the word ‘accommodating’ and ‘measured’ while the real hike hasn’t been done or even announced yet.

Feel the power of Alan “Invisible Hand” Greenspan’s Fed.

The federal fund rate right now and past rates, thanks to Wikipedia:


The rise has been steep for the past few years and if the hunch is true, the rise will be steeper soon. But nobody will do a Volcker, that's for sure. Inflation is still in check despite the arising fear a year ago.

Earlier today, a rally to kick Coke off campus was held at the Diag. The effort has been going on for a few weeks now and it is being organized by a coalition of student groups. The core members of the coalition are Amnesty International, Environmental Justice and SOLE. There are other supporters like the Student Greens and the Indian Student Association but I can't remember all of them.


The members of the campaign are trying to make the University administration to force Coke to act more responsibly on matters concerning the environment and human rights. In Colombia, a number of labor union leaders that were troublesome to the bottling plants administration have been killed by paramilitary and Coke is alleged to have a connection with the murders. Union members have also been forced to quit their union if they want to keep their jobs - the right to free association being taken away forceful.

Pertaining to the environment, in India, Coke is draining an aquifer and in effect depriving the poor local residents of precious water supply. Concurrently in India, there is a major movement to force Coke (and Pepsi too) entirely out of India. Here is a old article from BBC concerning Colas and India.

At the moment, the coalition is trying to get the Michigan Student Assembly to pass a resolution to condemn Coke. The first reading was read yesterday during the MSA weekly meeting and the motion will be up for voting next week. As I understand, heavy lobbying is happening within MSA. Despite the lobbying, I don’t see how the motion won’t go through since most of the board members seem to be from the left side of the political spectrum. With possible support from MSA, it is hoped that the University administration will be pressured to at least renegotiate its contract with Coke. A copy of the resolution can be found here.

While this is going on here in Michigan, other campuses are running the same campaign too. This is actually part of a nationwide protest against Coke. Some of them have managed to convince their schools to quit Coke.

Finally, next week, a few speakers, one of them is from Colombia, will be speaking on how bad the situation is in Colombia.

And now, some photos.

Environmental Justice people made that bottle-link and I helped them with it. It's 125 feet long and we spent almost two hours trying to get it done. We didn't buy any of them of course. Buying them to make the link rather defeats the purpose of boycotting Coke.


And this is somebody with the campaign poster. I don't know him but he is probably from Amnesty.


And this probably somebody from the Michigan Daily, taking a shot at the bottle-link. We at EJ are hoping it gets into the front page tomorrow.


The aftermath. It's going to be recycled of course.


And an explanation why the bottle-link is 125 feet.


More info on the issue is at Killer Coke.

p/s - I've learnt that the Daily editorial endorses our effort. w00t! The piece could be read at the Michigan Daily. There is also some hope that the New York Times catches this...

pp/s - today in World of Warcraft, I helped a few others, about 10 players, defending Astranaar, a town in the game, from Orcs' raids. It feels great to kick orcs' ass.

I'm proposing a new equation.

Weekends + World of Warcraft = lack of sleep

The first test ran smoothly and I already missed a meeting between Environmental Justice, Amnesty International and SOLE yesterday because I needed to catch up with a generation of lost sleep. The fact that I needed to catch up with my sleep with probably a proof for that equation.

I will be running a second test on my hypothesis next week.

p/s - I've just realized that sacrificing sleep increases the chance of committing horrible grammar.

I've been on World of Warcraft for more than 24 hours combined now since Thursday after the exam. Had some fun all day long until, earlier today, my friend successfully demostrated the worst kind of lag I've had ever since. My computer froze and all my senses could absord was the sound of the game; the frame rate was practically 0.

Frustrated, I logoff from Warcraft a few hours later and went to newegg.com, Price Watch and amazon.com to do price comparison for two components: memory and video card. (Google is a darling too, I say. Go Gooooooooooooooooooogle.)

The choice for memory is never a problem. I've always trusted Crucial Technology and so, I went straight for it. I saw other like Kingston and Corsair but I rather not face any difficulty with compactibility - inside my computer, I already have a Crucial's 256MB DDR.

The main issue is the video card. I must admit, I've been lagging with news and improvement in graphics - too many economics make me forget other stuff. The last time I read about video cards in the news was when ATi Radeon 9700 was the king. Right now, I'm not sure who's the king but I didn't know that there is a GeForce 6 out there. It seems right now, Radeon XT is the best right now but, I don't really know and all I want to do is play World of Warcraft.

I considered ATi Radeon 9700, which cost roughly $150. However, I was in the idea that that was an overkill. All I want to do with a new graphic card is to play World of Warcraft, not Half-Life 2 or Doom 3. Besides, my motherboard only support AGP 4x. Still, I might upgrade my mobo in the near future so...

So, I considered a GeForce...

Brb! (or maybe not) Gotta log into Warcraft now! The urge is too great to resist!

A tribute to an easy exam.


Heh, the picture didn't turn out as good as I had expected. But now, it's time for something serious. Something that I've been waiting for almost a month. Damn Amazon for that.


Oh! You can't see what that ridiculously happy guy is holding. Here:


World Of Warcraft baby!

Are you folks ready for our annual laugh?

I hope Bush has finally learnt his past mistakes, or else. Five more minutes and oh, I can't wait to listen to him.

p/s - alright. I take that back. It was good, at least to me and especially how he brought the social security issue to the table. I understand how the social system is flawed but I'm not sure privatization is the right solution. Regardless of that, I prefer one, instead of letting somebody else or the government to finance one's own future. The current system put the unnecessary burden on the wrong generation.

The environment though, received scant attention. Bush wants to encourage hydrogen fuel - something that he said in his last address. I'm not sure if he is actually trying anything at all though.

He also mentioned about cutting down spending while making tax cut permanent. Heh! Reagan wanted that too. I don't think cutting down both taxes and spending simultaneously is easy, if impossible is not the right choice of word. It is easier said than done, still.

pp/s - Low Culture is having some fun on Bush. More should be coming, considering how the authors love Bush. I've been reading the blog for a couple weeks now and I like it. It's now under blogroll.

Every dog has its day. I wish Chelsea godspeed and Man Ure the devilspeed. Must be a bad weekend for both Ajax and Arsenal. At least Ajax didn't lose.

At the same time, a lot of cruel people are having fun on me. But that is expected of since I always zealously push everything down Manchester United fans' throat whenever they lose to anybody. It's only fair to let them have a holiday once or twice during the season.

Thank goodness for people that I meet in person everyday don't give a damn for soccer. And now I remember why I'm a Manchester-United-hater.

Anyway, Google is running amok.

The earnings were seven times higher than a year earlier on revenue that doubled to more than $1 billion. The news also lifted shares of rival Internet companies Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Ask Jeeves Inc. (ASKJ.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , setting the tone for a possible tech rally on Wednesday.

I wish I were one of the stockholders.