Unsurprising from a narrow point of view, having read the superforecasting methodology where events are assigned probabilities based on leading events, the election of Trump was never an impossibility that it was made out to be by the pundits, pollsters, and yes late night show hosts including the likes of Trevor Noah and Colbert. Trevor was so laughably off the mark with his day before sketch, and whilst Colbert visibly maintained his preference, he was also careful to cerebrally show that he fully understood the possibility of Trump winning the election was real.
Coming from the last posting on Podesta and the complacent liberal stance of not gonna happen, it also shows how the US electorate seemed to decide that Trump, could be their leader for any of the following reasons -
that fulfils their economic self-interest, even if it includes putting up barriers against immigrants, and those not like them,
to help regain their hardhitting "international policeman" state position, and abandon the diplomacy that was Obama's stance, and make the world safer for them
restore the lost white pride, after 8 years of black man leadership, and hell no way will they allow a woman to lead them another 4 years
and just plain xenophobic, fear that drives their decision to vote Trump.
3. Can't see how the choice was a rational one. It was an emotional one, driven by fear, hate, insecurity etc.
4. Now that you have the ticket, Trump needs to regain the trust and credibility lost during the campaigning. Malaysia has endured over 50 years of shitty campaigning followed up by sometimes very strong leadership, albeit that being absent in the past decade or so. For the sake of the rest of the world, Trump's policies must be credible and rational not just for them, but the rest of the world too.
5. A final word about democracy - Overrated. Leadership succession decision when placed in the hands of the knowledgeable and sincere, and guided by God, "trumps" leaving that most important of decision in the hands of the majority. American voters join their British voter brethren in failing to vote the most rational decision possible and allowed emotions to sway their minds, perhaps thinking 4 years isn't too long. Guess what, it bloody is.
Interest in the US is crucial to understand how the world works. They have military superiority - the ability for military projection in any given location with their aircraft carriers which are just floating military airports, long-range airpower, ICBMs, drone assisted and fully teched out land army. They have political power - with the protection money accorded to NATO, seat on UN SC. They have the tech although with the vast amounts of money poured by VC and Govt you'd think that the gap with the rest of the world could be a lot larger that where it is now. Consider that China is slowly grasping that tech capabilities now. They also have economic power, although that is eroded now given their propensity to use a vast chunk of it on their military complex. The projection of that economic power could be seen more visibly in the interests of the large American mega-corporates - the oil companies and the tech companies, many of which singly have bigger revenues than the GDP figures of most countries.
So, at the end of it - it's all in the money as that is how it has been structured and networked, the architecture of it has remained invisible by the outer layers of decorum and diplomacy. What they have got right historically has been the preservation of values that matter to the commoners - meritocracy, doing things right by hard work and perseverance, respect, trust etc. Their 2016 elections have shown that beneath it all, these are a bunch of self-interest, crooked and scandal-ridden personalities competing for the highest position in the land, and the earth currently.
Public interest? Give me a break.
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Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run
The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign
are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome
Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of
people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are
the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks
from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John
Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with
scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal:
they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the
dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest;
they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes
road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class
looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for
whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a
comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are
always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our
modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national
media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the
high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every
plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision
droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the
enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never
explain themselves.
Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by
sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been
a Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel
uncomfortable digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a
crime, after all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal
information has been exposed, since WikiLeaks
doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the
issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for
sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from
John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to
confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real,
there is a small possibility they aren’t.
With all that taken into consideration, I think the
WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper
reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and
majesty.
The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present
in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving
colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children.
Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course,
and high academic achievement.
Certain industries loom large and virtuous here. Hillary’s
ingratiating speeches to Wall Street are well known of course, but what
is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt,
smiling financiers now seem to stand on every corner, constantly
proffering advice about this and that. In one now-famous email chain,
for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative
Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name
President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change
election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding
why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery).
The far-sighted innovators of Silicon Valley are also here
in force, interacting all the time with the leaders of the party of the
people. We watch as Podesta appears to email Sheryl Sandberg. He makes plans to visit
Mark Zuckerberg (who, according to one missive, wants to “learn more
about next steps for his philanthropy and social action”). Podesta
exchanges emails with an entrepreneur about an ugly race now unfolding
for Silicon Valley’s seat in Congress; this man, in turn, appears to
forward to Podesta the remarks of yet another Silicon Valley grandee,
who complains
that one of the Democratic combatants in that fight was criticizing
billionaires who give to Democrats. Specifically, the miscreant Dem in
question was said to be:
“… spinning (and attacking) donors who have supported
Democrats. John Arnold and Marc Leder have both given to Cory Booker,
Joe Kennedy, and others. He is also attacking every billionaire that
donates to [Congressional candidate] Ro [Khanna], many whom support
other Democrats as well.”
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Attacking
billionaires! In the year 2015! It was, one of the correspondents
appears to write, “madness and political malpractice of the party to
allow this to continue”.
There are wonderful things to be found in this treasure
trove when you search the gilded words “Davos” or “Tahoe”. But it is
when you search “Vineyard” on the WikiLeaks dump that you realize these
people truly inhabit a different world from the rest of us. By
“vineyard”, of course, they mean Martha’s Vineyard, the ritzy vacation
resort island off the coast of Massachusetts where presidents Clinton
and Obama spent most of their summer vacations. The Vineyard is a place
for the very, very rich to unwind, yes, but as we learn from these
emails, it is also a place of high idealism; a land of enlightened
liberal commitment far beyond anything ordinary citizens can ever
achieve.
Consider, for example, the 2015 email
from a foundation executive to a retired mortgage banker (who then
seems to have forwarded the note on to Podesta, and thus into history)
expressing concern that “Hillary’s image is being torn apart in the
media and there’s not enough effective push back”. The public eavesdrops
as yet another financier invites
Podesta to a dinner featuring “food produced exclusively by the
island’s farmers and fishermen which will be matched with specially
selected wines”. We learn how a Hillary campaign aide recommended
that a policy statement appear on a certain day so that “It wont get in
the way of any other news we are trying to make – but far enough ahead
of Hamptons and Vineyard money events”. We even read the pleadings
of a man who wants to be invited to a state dinner at the White House
and who offers, as one of several exhibits in his favor, the fact that
he “joined the DSCC Majority Trust in Martha’s Vineyard (contributing
over $32,400 to Democratic senators) in July 2014”.
(Hilariously, in another email chain, the Clinton team appears to scheme to “hit” Bernie Sanders for attending “DSCC retreats on Martha’s Vineyard with lobbyists”.)
Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not
hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum
Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to
Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous
word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.
This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange
jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental
thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty
to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course
Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and
then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was
done at the state department. Of course she appears to think
that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”.
And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama
administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that
the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They
are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.
Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears
to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here
go from foundation to government to thinktank to startup. There are
honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced
degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break
every boundary.
But the One Big Boundary remains. Yes, it’s all supposed to
be a meritocracy. But if you aren’t part of this happy, prosperous
in-group – if you don’t have John Podesta’s email address – you’re out.
1. The remnants of what I recall from my engineering degree is predicated on technologies related to physically manipulating electron pathways in new materials to embed programming codes. My work has been to maintaining stable and reliable conductance of electrons to the masses. Essentially, in summary, sciences based on physics and a little bit of materials engineering, maths and programming design.
2. Biology and chemistry didn't enter into it much. I tend to think inspirational icons can push you towards developing a passion into any of the scientific fields, but physcics has always held my interest. Trying to understand the laws that govern the physical world, and enabling the laws to be applied to humanity's benefit in a repeatable manner.
3. The governance of those knowledge didn't interest me either. That was the stuff for others.
4. But there's no getting away from it. Administration of the sciences is necessary to prolong innovation and extending knowledge. Intersection of capital and requisite returns, funder interests and scientific curiosity and risk-taking must be governed and administered for optimality. Optimality being the operative word as the different constituencies can run at cross-purposes to each other.
5. How much is the risk appetite of the funders to see scientific progress? How important is it to use it and leapfrog adjacent economic rivals, be it different applications of capital or external stakeholders? How can the technological absorption be maximised for the masses? How can technology be deployed to benefit the needy and solve currently unsolvable problems?
6. The different agendas are too apparent. As usual, the need is to strike the right chord, hit the right buttons, walk the right path and have the right ecosystem backing the overarching purpose.
Physics, chemistry and biology
7. I've hardly spent too much time trying to compare the three disciplines. But the reality is that biology is on a totally different plane to physics and chemistry. I am in awe of biology and its design and its potential applications.
8. Take an organism, any organism. Look into its cell makeup and the physiology of it. You can't help but marvel at the way it sustains itself and reproductive capabilities, metabolism-propelled nourishment and self-repair, defenses against harm, works within an elegant system with such simplicity, efficiency and balance. Subhanallah.
9. And then there is the consciousness that allows to become aware of such subtlety and beauty. And the consciousness and knowledge and will to use this understanding to make things better for the greater good. This is where things can get a bit iffy, when the rationality of sciences meets the irrationality of free will. Allah help us find our way out.
10. Of course, on running its course, it dies. And again, even in death it serves to remind the living of its place in the world.
What was previously a straightforward UMNO vs PAS for the majority Malay votes are now divisive totally for the Malay voterbank. No matter the ideals of each, they have all contributed in their own short-sightedness to this present malady.
From the spectrum of correcting Malay economic imbalances to rightwing racial privileges, UMNO brings multifaceted elements that have brought forth the Malay-muslim growth enjoyed by my generation. That is now at risk.
Accumulated misdemeanours over the years during UMNO leadership of the Malays and the country I can categorize into two:
1. institutional abuses seen before during the constitutional crisis and replayed out in full in the appointment of senior positions.
2. has not reasonably dealt with howling mad racial-based demands A compliant chief of police with selective investigation and questionable record of keeping public safety. Not to say, poor record of defending itself from false allegations. Here's one, and my conclusion is right at the bottom.
Can google "strip search Chinese national" here- reported by an Australian daily:
"The one-minute, 11-second clip starts with a female police officer ordering a naked Chinese woman, possibly in her 20s, to do the squats while holding her ears. The footage, taken on a mobile phone, appears to have been shot through a window without either woman's knowledge.
Lim Kit Siang, leader of the opposition Democratic Action Party, called it Malaysia's Abu Ghraib, a reference to the humiliating abuse of Iraqi prisoners in a US military prison near Baghdad.
A DAP politician, Teresa Kok, played the video clip in parliament on Friday to politicians and the media. "Is it standard practice for police to ask detainees to strip naked and to do ear squats?" Ms Kok asked afterwards.
Mr Lim said that the Malaysian public were entitled to know why the police as a whole "seem so indifferent and detached in a police scandal which had rocked the country and has such far-reaching consequences to the country's tourism, trade, economy as well as the country's international standing, particular the Malaysia-China relationship".
The issue died down after the girl was identified in an official inquiry after a delayed reasoning that this was standard procedure elsewhere (which it is). The lady's name is Hemy, of Malay descent.
