Criminalise War Conference 2009

The Kuala Lumpur Foundation to Criminalise War held a two days 'Criminalise War Conference' at the Putra World Trade Center on 28 Oct to 29 Oct 2009. This was followed by another two days of the 'War Crimes Tribunal' held at the same venue.

Candle light vigil

In solidarity with RPK, Teresa Kok and the detainees of ISA, the blogging community in the Klang valley gathered last night (14 Sept 2008) for a candle light vigil at the Blog House in Bukit Damansara.

In spite of the rain and at very short notice (less than 3 hours for many) yet more than 100 people gathered from 9:00 pm till about 11:00 pm with umbrella in one hand and a lighted candle in the other to hear speaker after speaker gave a short speech.

Among these speakers were such people like the elected members of parliament, YB Sivarasa, YB Wee Choo Keong, the president of the Bar Council, Datuk Ambiga. Others were bloggers, among them Zorro unmasked (Bernard Khoo), Ancient Mariner (Capt Yusof Ahmad), Shanghai Fish (Stephen Francis) and also a few from the media.





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Origin of the word "MERDEKA"

Merdeka is a word in the Malay language meaning independence. It is derived from a Sanskrit word (Maharddhika) used to designate former Portuguese and Dutch slaves from India in the East Indies, whence the Malay meaning of "free(dom)" is derived.

When the Indonesians fought for independence from the Dutch they used the slogan Merdeka ("freedom"), which is derived from Mardijker.

The term Mardijker is a Dutch corruption of the Portuguese version of Sanskrit Maharddhika meaning "great and mighty man". In the Malay archipelago, this term had acquired the meaning of a freed slave.

The ancestors of the Mardijkers had been slaves of the Portuguese in India, and were brought to Indonesia by the Dutch, especially after the 1641 Dutch conquest of Malacca.

The Mardijker were a community in Batavia (modern Jakarta), comprised of descendants of freed slaves. They were mostly Christian, of Indian ancestry, and spoke a Portuguese-based creole language.

sources:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merdeka
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardijker_people

You Can Make A Difference

A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: 'I am blind, please help.' There were only a few coins in the hat.

A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, 'Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?'

The man said, 'I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way.'
What he had written was: 'Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it.'

Do you think the first sign and the second sign were saying the same thing?

Of course both signs told people the boy was blind. But the first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people they were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

Moral of the Story: Be thankful for what you have. Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively.

Invite others towards good with wisdom. Live life with no excuse and love with no regrets. When life gives you a 100 reasons to cry, show life that you have 1000 reasons to smile. Face your past without regret. Handle your present with confidence. Prepare for the future without fear. Keep the faith and eradicate the fear.

Great men say, 'Life has to be an incessant process of repair and reconstruction, of discarding evil and developing goodness. In the journey of life, if you want to travel without fear, you must have the ticket of a good conscience.'

The most beautiful thing is to see a person smiling
And even more beautiful is, knowing that you are the reason behind it!!!

"Chief Two Eagles"

Where We Went Wrong

The old Sioux chief sat in his reservation hut, smoking the ceremonial pipe, eyeing the two US government officials sent to interview him.

"Chief Two Eagles," one official began, "you have observed the white man for many generations, you have seen his wars and his products, you have seen all his progress, and all his problems."

The chief nodded. The official continued, "Considering recent events in New York, in your opinion, where has the white man gone wrong?"

The chief stared at the government officials and continued smoking his pipe for over a minute, and then calmly replied: "When white man found this land, Indians were running it. No taxes. No debt. No house payments. No Daycare. Plenty buffalo. Women did all the cooking. Medicine man free. Indian men hunted and fished all the time."

The chief smiled, and added quietly, "White man dumb enough to think he could improve a system like that.

Wonderful New Product

Announcing the new Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device, otherwise known as the BOOK.

It's a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It's so easy to use even a child can operate it. Just lift its cover. Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere -- even sitting in an armchair by the fire -- yet it is powerful enough to hold ass much information as a CD-ROM disk.

Here's how it works: each BOOK is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. These pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. By using both sides of each sheet, manufacturers are able to cut costs in half.

Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into your brain. A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet. The BOOK may be taken up at any time and used by merely opening it. The "Browse" feature allows you to move instantly to any sheet, and move forward or backward as you wish. Most come with an "index" feature, which pinpoints the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval.

An optional "BOOKmark" accessory allows you to open the BOOK to the exact place you left it in a previous session -- even if the BOOK has been closed. BOOKmarks fit universal design standards; thus a single BOOKmark can be used in BOOKs by various manufacturers.

Portable, durable and affordable, the BOOK is the entertainment wave of the future, and many new titles are expected soon, due to the surge in popularity of its programming tool, the Portable Erasable-Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language stylus [PENCIL].

Sri Lanka Slide Show