Return to the origins

1. Bahasa has this nice proverb saying "kembali ke pangkal jalan" to signify life's typical journey of returning to fundamentals whenever we veer away from where we intend to go.
2. I've always had this feeling of chasing after money, no matter how interim, that objective becomes a domineering overwhelming instinct that eats up all our efforts, time and resources. No matter how noble the intent can be, ie looking after my family's interests and financial demands, it then becomes the mechanism where the original direction will be lost. There will be no balance, no proportion, and looking for proportion no matter how clearly it resides outside of the workplace now, it would be imbalanced when we lose the sense that Allah is the overriding, primary aim of life.
3. It has taken Sarah's leaving to ignite that need, now becoming a temporary single parent would naturally increase that reliance on Allah which I had quite conveniently left it by the wayside. It is time to return.
4. Just to add to the sense of unrealness, RTC has now initiated a video screening of proof that Anwar cannot control his Thamby. Talk of the inadequacy of someone raising libel on others. I cant visualise any other person with this kind of background displaying such a disregard of personal embarassment and shame, inability to find remorse and accountability, and no feeling of political responsibility to chase a personal vendetta. Society needs clean, clear-thinking, above this dirty politics that UMNO has become so synonymous with. I do feel a personal calling in this regard, and the call of money seems to be the only obstacle holding me back.
5. Elsewhere, Fukushima will result in a much increased cost of nuclear generation, and it remains to be seen if coupled with variability of oil price whether this could really push the envelope for RE generation, no matter how un prepared it is to become mainstream currently and the demands of subsidies to get it up. Certainly a business opportunity.
6. Wifey is overseas for the next 2 weeks - I'm bearing the brunt of the work at office and home in that period. I'll have to decide if this is worthwhile as a full-fledged career. Nevertheless, the demands of a PIBG Secretary, a business matching organiser, a scientific advisory technopreneur and a trainer could certainly be a productive alternative. 

Scary happening - being in limbo

A reminder of the timelessness of the Akhirah.

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/23/man-trapped-coma-23-years

Trapped in his own body for 23 years - the coma victim who screamed unheard

• Misdiagnosed man's tale of rebirth thanks to doctor

• Total paralysis masked fully functioning brain

Rom Houben, 46, was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state after an accident in his 20s but can now communicate by computer keyboard. Photograph: VTM Belgium

For 23 years Rom Houben was ­imprisoned in his own body. He saw his doctors and nurses as they visited him during their daily rounds; he listened to the conversations of his carers; he heard his mother deliver the news to him that his father had died. But he could do nothing. He was unable to communicate with his doctors or family. He could not move his head or weep, he could only listen.

Doctors presumed he was in a vegetative state following a near-fatal car crash in 1983. They believed he could feel nothing and hear nothing. For 23 years.

Then a neurologist, Steven Laureys, who decided to take a radical look at the state of diagnosed coma patients, released him from his torture. Using a state-of-the-art scanning system, Laureys found to his amazement that his brain was functioning almost normally.

"I had dreamed myself away," said Houben, now 46, whose real "state" was discovered three years ago, according to a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel this week.

Laureys, a neurologist at the ­University of Liege in Belgium, published a study in BMC Neurology earlier this year saying Houben could be one of many cases of falsely diagnosed comas around the world. He discovered that although Houben was completely paralysed, he was also completely conscious — it was just that he was unable to communicate the fact.

Houben now communicates with one finger and a special touchscreen on his wheelchair – he has developed some movement with the help of intense physiotherapy over the last three years.

He realised when he came round after his accident, which had caused his heart to stop and his brain to be starved of oxygen for several minutes, that his body was paralysed. Although he could hear every word his doctors spoke, he could not communicate with them.

"I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," he said, via his keyboard.

The Belgian former engineering student, who speaks four languages, said he coped with being effectively trapped in his own body by meditating. He told doctors he had "travelled with my thoughts into the past, or into another existence altogether". Sometimes, he said, "I was only my consciousness and nothing else".

The moment it was discovered he was not in a vegetative state, said Houben, was like being born again. "I'll never forget the day that they discovered me," he said. "It was my second birth".

Experts say Laureys' findings are likely to reopen the debate over when the decision should be made to terminate the lives of those in comas who appear to be unconscious but may have almost fully-functioning brains.

Belgian doctors used an internationally-accepted scale to monitor Houben's state over the years. Known as the Glasgow Coma Scale, it requires assessment of the eyes, verbal and motor responses. But they failed to assess him correctly and missed signs that his brain was still functioning.

Last night his mother, Fina, said in an interview with Belgian RTBF that they had taken him to the US five times for reexamination. The breakthrough came when it became clear that Houben could indicate yes and no with his foot.

"Powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it," he tapped out on to the screen during an interview with the Belgian network last night, AP reported.

Laureys, who is head of the Coma Science Group and department of neurology at Liege University hospital, has advised on several prominent coma cases, such as the American Terri Schiavo, whose life support was withdrawn in 2005 after 15 years in a coma.

Laureys concluded that coma patients are misdiagnosed "on a disturbingly regular basis". He examined 44 patients believed to be in a vegetative state, and found that 18 of them responded to communication.

"Once someone is labelled as being without consciousness, it is very hard to get rid of that," he told Der Spiegel.

He said patients suspected of being in a non-reversible coma should be "tested 10 times" and that comas, like sleep, have different stages and need to be monitored.

Houben hopes to write a book detailing his trauma and his "rebirth".

Global financial system reform

1.       The ribawi-based financial system, the lubricant of economic growth in the developed world and therefore a major mechanism and tool to prolong their economic and political hegemony is under surveillance.

2.       Britain, the Great prefixing its moniker long gone, is now slowly trying to fulfill a global leadership vacuum it lost painfully when Blair was playing lapdog to Bush Jr, and clearly by playing the moral high ground in climate change and the global financial revamp issues. In climate change, it is trying to be the middleman between Obama’s US insisting on self-regulation and the rest of the world who insists the world’s largest polluter should have to answer to some form of polluting taxation.

3.       Now, Adair Turner is cranking up the pressure on the global financial system, insisting it has grown too big for its good and too complex to be controlled.

4.       He has his own ideas, but perhaps the is not yet a ready admission that the alternative should really an equity-based financial instrument which curbs excessive growth of financial instruments based on underlying asset values, aka Islamic finance. Asset bubbles and systemic shocks are painful manifestations of the interest-based system, and it’s interesting that Turner even raised the issue that taxation is leaning towards interest by taxing profits after interest.

5.       Jewish interest groups make it impossible to change their forte in interest management, obtaining unpronounceable amounts of profits since before the days of Rothschild’s and such. Ford’s Zionist Protocols could have something on this – but as ever, I am cynical of what could come out of this. Until and unless the D-8 of the OIC, the OIC itself, the rest of the developing world acknowledge that they too can partake in global leadership and compete on equal footing with the great powers, I doubt they could transform themselves into paragons of virtue and goodness. Bubbles have come, and they have gone, and it still remains as it were. Interest groups reign supreme, and the shadow players behind the scenes are the supremos.

6.       There is so much to do to bring back justice to the world.

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The agenda for a global finance revamp 06 Nov 2009

By David Wessel - The Wall Street Journal Asia 

Date Published : 06 Nov 2009

The repair of the global financial-regulatory system is too important to future prosperity to be left to technocrats and bankers. But the substance is so arcane and complicated that few politicians or informed citizens can grasp the issues, let alone choose solutions.

That puts a premium on public-spirited insiders who think and speak clearly enough for the rest of us to understand, even if only to disagree with their diagnoses and remedies. It is that talent that makes Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's uber-regulator, the Financial Services Authority, worth listening to.

The U.K. didn't, as Lord Turner puts it, have "a good war." A couple of its big banks and several smaller ones imploded. It had a housing boom and bust. Its people put savings in Icelandic banks that collapsed. Its economic engine, finance, is sputtering. Its recession was deep.

And what had been seen by many in the U.S. as a model -- a central bank that stuck to setting interest rates and a single regulator that oversaw banking, securities markets and insurance -- is discredited. The rising Conservative Party wants to undo the structure built a decade ago by now-Prime Minister Gordon Brown and would fold financial supervision into the Bank of England.

Lord Turner, 54 years old, a Cambridge-educated former Merrill Lynch executive and McKinsey consultant, didn't arrive at the FSA until September 2008, well after FSA mistakes that contributed to the crisis. That liberates him to preach without first confessing sin, and preach he does. In a conversation in the London offices of the Climate Change Commission, which he also chairs, he was animated, even passionate, even though he had flown overnight from Washington. The word, according to Lord Turner:

-- One, finance got too big. "We must be more willing to ask . . . whether the financial system is delivering its vital economic functions as efficiently as possible, or whether parts of it can, and before the crisis did, swell beyond their economically efficient size," he said in a recent speech. He clearly favors the latter view: There was more "clever finance" and more trading than desirable to keep the world economy humming. Hence his willingness to consider a global tax on financial transactions, to the horror of many of his peers and the banking establishment.

-- Two, there was too much debt in the system. "There is a huge bias in the tax system towards debt," he said, largely because companies can deduct interest payments before computing taxable profits. "If we can't change that, then the regulatory approach needs to lean against that." Hence all the talk of reducing the leverage of financial firms. While U.S. and U.K. households and businesses did borrow more during the boom, the big run-up was in borrowing among financial firms matched by a huge increase in trading relative to the value of underlying economic activity, he observes. When bankers bellyache, he refers them to point one above.

-- Three, regulators failed to curb excesses, but politicians hardly encouraged aggressive regulation. The cry for "better regulation" meant less regulation, both in the U.K. and U.S. The diagnosis of Britain's economic woes was that regulation was stifling entrepreneurship, he said. No politician asked the FSA: "Why aren't you doing more to restrain this boom?" Few, if any, politicians can point to a speech made three years ago that asked why regulators weren't restraining lending or regulating with less of a "light touch."

-- Four, erecting a wall between ordinary deposit-taking and lending, on one hand, and trading on the other is impractical and unwise. Economies benefit when banks turn loans into securities or hedge their positions -- to a point. But by forcing banks to hold capital in the trading operations to provide thicker cushions to absorb losses -- he calls it "a bias towards conservatism" in trading beyond what is necessary for ordinary banking -- speculative trading will migrate away from banks toward hedge funds and the like, a change Lord Turner welcomes. That makes banks less risky (with smaller profits in boom times and smaller losses in busts), but he said it requires more oversight of big trading firms which, history proves, can endanger the whole system.

-- Five, for all the angst about the slow pace of postcrisis repair of the financial system, global regulators are making surprising progress toward consensus on a new regulatory regime. "We are attempting in 18 months to do changes far more radical than we did in Basel II that took between 12 and 15 years and dealt with some of the areas which proved to be less important," Lord Turner said, referring to the pact regulators reached in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision that didn't avoid the crisis. Pushed by the newly empowered Financial Stability Board, the process, he said, "has worked better than I would have expected," he said.

Britain, of course, hasn't the clout to rewrite the rules of banking unilaterally. Lord Turner may not have precisely the same job in a year's time, if the Conservative Party takes power and sticks to its promise to abolish the FSA. But with a trenchant voice, he is helping to set the agenda for the most significant revamp of financial regulation in more than half a century.

turmoil, tsunami and armageddon? - causes

Well - I could spend some time to really understand and try to predict the right way of overcoming this, but the sheer complexity of the whole issue means it'll take time to comprehend, let alone undertake the necessary structural changes.

For a start, this is a brilliant encapsulation of the effects of greed, not a technical description of the mechanics of the failure, that I presume will be well covered in other areas - but also fittingly describes the failure of ribaa'...

http://timesbusiness.typepad.com/money_weblog/2008/10/10-people-who-p.html#more
Minsky:Dr. Michael Hudson - global research dot ca wrote:"A generation ago, for instance, Hyman Minsky gained a following by describing what he aptly called the Ponzi stage of the business cycle. It was the phase in which debtors no longer were able to pay off their loans out of current income (as in Stage #1, where they earned enough to cover their interest and amortization charges), and indeed did not even earn enough to pay the interest charges (as in Stage #2), but had to borrow the money to pay the interest owed to their bankers and other creditors. In this Stage #3 the interest was simply added onto the debt, growing at a compound rate. It ends in a crash.This was the flip side of the magic of compound interest – the belief that people can get rich by "putting money to work." Money doesn’t really work, of course. When lent out, it extracts interest from the "real" production and consumption economy, that is, from the labor and industry that actually do the work. It is much like a tax, a monopoly rent levied by the financial sector. Yet this quasi-tax, this extractive financial rent (as Alfred Marshall explained over a century ago) is the dynamic that is supposed to enable corporate, state and local pension funds to pay for retirement simply out of stock market gains and bond investments – purely financially and hence at the expense of the economy at large whose employees are supposed to be gainers. This is the essence of "pension-fund capitalism," a Ponzi-scheme variant of finance capitalism. Unfortunately, it is grounded in purely mathematical relationships that have little grounding in the "real" economy in which families and companies produce and consume.Mr. Paulson’s bailout plan reflects a state of denial with regard to this dynamic. The debt overhead is self-aggravating, becoming less and less "solvable" and hence more of a quandary, that is, a problem with no visible solution. At least, no solution acceptable to Wall Street, and hence to Mr. Paulson and the Democratic and Republican congressional leaders. The banks and large swaths of the financial sector are broke from having made bad gambles in the belief that money could be made to "work" under conditions that shrink the underlying industrial economy and stifle wage gains, eroding the market for consumer goods. Debt deflation reduces sales and business activity in general, and hence corporate earnings. This depresses stock market and real estate prices, and hence the value of collateral pledged to back the economy’s debt overhead. Negative equity leads to bankruptcy and foreclosures."He also states:The main impact will be to reinforce the concentration of wealth in the hands of creditors (the wealthiest 10 percent of the population) rather than wiping out financial assets (and debts) through the bankruptcies that were occurring as a result of "market forces". Is it too much to say that we are seeing the end of economic democracy and the emergence of a financial oligarchy ­ a self-serving class whose actions threaten to polarize society and, in the process, stifle economic growth and lead to the very bankruptcy that the bailout was supposed to prevent?Everything that I have read in economic history leads me to believe that we are entering a nightmare transition era. The business cycle is essentially a financial cycle. Upswings tend to become economy-wide Ponzi schemes as banks and other creditors, savers and investors receive interest and plow it back into new loans, accruing yet more interest as debt levels rise. This is the "magic of compound interest" in a nutshell. No "real" economy in history has grown at a rate able to keep up with this financial dynamic. Indeed, payment of this interest by households and businesses leaves less to spend on goods and services, causing markets to shrink and investment and employment to be cut back."
We all should be organizing to take our democracies back.